Recently, I was invited to attend a webinar about how businesses can be built 100% around webinars. The speaker claims their products were sold entirely via webinars only and of course, the customary point that they make really good money doing it too. Because he was involved with the (offline) seminar scene in the past, he acknowledged he simply ported the offline seminar model onto online webinars.

Now, I won’t pretend to know anything about offline seminars. But I have a good idea speakers can make some really good money. And that sort of tampered my skepticism about his claims.

That very weekend, we held the CSS Quickstart class. It was of course held in a webinar format. It was amazing! Best class I’ve ever led, the energy was fantastic and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I’ve always enjoyed speaking as a guest on other people’s webinars and this was no different. But I came out of that weekend with a new understanding – even though this was not my first webinar. This time, I really felt a thirst for live instruction and a true connection with people who attended. And yes, we made sales.

We had people who signed up the very last minute, who had never ever heard of me, but when they left, I know I had managed to break down huge chunks of the wall if not all of it. It was like super fast relationship building. Because I am real and I know they are.

I thought back to last year when my friend Lexi held her very first webinar and she made it a series on blogging. Later, she confessed publicly that webinar resulted in thousands of dollars of affiliate commissions. I was in more than one of her webinars as a speaker and as an attendee. I know the kind of response and chatter.

I think a little further back to another friend Angela Wills. She too did a webinar series once for affiliate products and the results were great too. Further still… Kelly McCausey has been holding webinars for as long as I can remember and her famous one is the Hot Seminar Series. Kelly’s a smart cookie. She won’t be doing that year after year if it were not profitable.

Going back to the speaker I was telling you about, he was saying that you don’t have to be selling an online product to conduct webinars. There are many industry such as insurance, realtors, law firms etc that need customer education before a sale. That makes sense.

Together, these experiences have helped convince me that a larger webinar presence is a good one for us and that’s what we will do. Why not? Since we are well equipped with the tools via our sister site, MeetingOnNow.

Have you held webinars? Has your experience been profitable or lackluster?