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People wanted to talk to me now as opposed to me reaching out to them.I remember this specifically, I said, "Wow." The first one I had, 350 people show up, it was a freeevent. I got 1,000 from sponsors. I had four tables at 250 a pop, or five tables or somethingthat I'd sold, so I made about a grand, I broke even from all the work I put into it. I said, "I wonderif I can charge people at the door and we'll still get the same amount of people to show up."So I charged 5 at the next event, or it was one of the next events, I charged 5, and I wasscared that no one was going to show up. We had more people show up at that event than theprevious event and it cut out the bottom feeders, the people who were just there for themselvesand not willing to give. So I said, "I wonder if I can charge even more?" So I kept increasing theprice from 5 to 10 to 20 and more and more people started coming and more people paidbigger dollars for sponsorships.I started asking the restaurant, the places that I would host them, I would say, "I'm going to bringyou 300 to 500 people, but I'd 10% to 15% of food and bar sales." So I started leveraginganyway I could to generate some income. I was taking from the door; I was taking from thesponsorships and food and bar sales. I was making a few grand in cash when I'd do this. So forme, I started making a little bit of money. I was like, "You know what, this is still chump changeand I'm scrapping around every month just promoting events, but I'm not really leveragingsomething with passive income." You can appreciate this.I started also doing one-on-one consulting where I was charging 50 and eventually up to 300 asession for LinkedIn profile makeovers. But again, I was trading my time for dollars, and I didn'twant to do that. It wasn't passive. So my friends suggested that I write a book about it and getmy information out there so I could sell it to the masses. So that's what I did, but I still wasn'tmaking any money after I wrote this book. I was making some sales, but it was doing somethingdifferent for me, it was giving me a platform to speak and do that.Pat: Was this an e-book or a book you can actually . . .Lewis: This is a physical paperback book.Pat: Very cool.Lewis: It's up on Amazon and up on BarnesandNoble.com, things like that. And I said, "How canI leverage this same information from a 15 book, but generate a real business from this so I'mnot scrapping around every month trying to make a few thousand dollars." It wasn't until my firstwebinar, a friend of mine named Joel Comm said, "I want you to come on and present on awebinar." I'd never even heard of what a webinar was at the time, this is in 2009.He said, "Come on and do a webinar. I want you to share the exact same content that's in yourLinkenIn book. Break it up, you need to create some slides, share some of the content, talk

about how people can leverage it to build their business or get some more leads. And then atthen end, I want you to have some type of training or a product you have, and I'm going to take acommission based on the sales you get from this live webinar."I had no clue what he was talking about. I didn't know about affiliate marketing, I had never beenon a webinar, I barely knew how to open up PowerPoint. I didn't know how to create a product,let alone a sales page and hook it up with a shopping cart and merchant account. I was soclueless and really scared about what I was doing.Luckily, I had some good friends who had created sales pages, so I had a friend create a reallyjanky looking sales page last minute, connect it to one shopping cart, and just made sureeverything worked when people clicked the checkout button. I didn't have a product because Ididn't know what I was doing. So what I said is, "I'm going to create a live training for threeweeks. I'll do two hours a day, once a day for three weeks, or excuse me, once a week for threeweeks in a row and I'll charge 150." So I did this, not knowing what was going to happen. I gavemy speech over the webinar. There were around 600 people on. I was sweating bullets.I was staying at my brother's house at the time, so I went from my sister's couch to renting aroom from my brother's place for 250 a month, which was a lot of money for me at the time. Iremember being in his foyer area, it was a hot summer day, I had to take my shirt off because Iwas sweating and so nervous about this Webinar. I was so scared to talk in front of people. Iwas sweating, shirtless, the Webinar starts. I put these slides together last minute, it was sojanky looking and unprofessional.The first 15 minutes my voice was trembling and shaking as Joel was introducing me and I'mtrying to get into the content. Eventually I get right into my information about LinkedIn and I startto hit my stride on the webinar. I give some great points. I know my content so once I startedtalking about it; it was good and people loved it. At the end of the webinar, I'm basically like,okay, guys, here's a link. I've got this cool training that I'm going to create. It's not even startinguntil next week, but go check it out if you want to and you can see the price on the sales page orwhatever and I was like I hope you guys enjoyed it.Joel was like, "Wait a minute, let's go over exactly what this is. This is some great information.People were blown away on this live webinar." So he broke it down for everyone what thetraining actually was and kind of helped me sell it. I was so nervous. I wasn't sure the webinarwas done. We basically closed it down, but I didn't want to close the screen down, I was scaredI was going to break something or somebody was going to hear me. I eventually waited until hehad ended the webinar.I opened up my Gmail account. The only thing I saw was, you've got money, and it was synchedup through my PayPal at the time so I think that's what it says, you've got money whensomeone sends you money. My entire email account was filled out because I think I show 50results, so the top 50 it said, you've got payment or you've got money or whatever it said and I

started freaking out, because I realized I just made that many sales where my entire Gmail onmy screen all I could see was, you've got payment. I basically made 6300 after one hour.For me, going from scrapping around and not knowing how to generate any money and hostingthese events and doing all this stuff, one-on-one stuff I was like wow. If I can transfer all myinformation into leveraging it for a larger audience like this, then I could really build a significantbusiness. At the time going from sleeping on my sister's couch to paying 250 rent a room at mybrother's place for a year to this happening, 6300 in an hour, it was life-changing for me. It reallyflipped the switch for me where I said I could get on one of these every single day and do anhour of this every day.I said if I can make 6300 every day, I can do this all the time. It got to the point where for thelast two years I've basically done a webinar, I do a lot of them. I've done over 500 Webinars overthe last couple years. Now if I do 6,300 on a webinar it's a very bad day and I'm depressed, soI've learned to leverage the information and package things over the last couple of years to reallybuild a significant business now for myself.Pat: That's incredible. So what kind of figures are you seeing now when you do a webinar? Howmany people attend and how much can you expect?Lewis: It all depends on the product. I've got a number of different products now. That was myfirst product, I've got like seven or eight now, different price points from 100 to 1000 and evenhigher for different coaching programs we have and live events. It all depends, but we usually tryto get 500 to 1,000 people on every webinar that we host and that's pretty standard for us anddepending on the price point we pretty much know the conversion rate we're going to getdepending on the price point.For the 100 course or training or service or product, it's usually around 25% to 40%conversion. If it's a 500 course, it's usually around 12% to 18%, and if it's 1000 or above, ifwe're getting 8% to 15% depending on the audience and the product and the offering is wherewe're at.Pat: That's huge. Some significant money now coming from webinars and this is kind of yourideal platform to do business on now.Lewis: Yeah, I'm a huge believer in webinars and I just think they're amazing because they do acouple of things for you. You don't have to travel anywhere. You just spoke recently at BlogWorld and you had a great time. You said it was one of the biggest attended at the event and yousaid you wanted to get into it more because it's fun.You get to speak in front of an audience. They get to understand who you are. They see you.They hear you. There's an experience around it. They know, like and trust you more and they'reprobably more willing to be your fan or buy from you in the future after they hear from you. But

you can't travel around. You told me also that it took you two weeks to recover.Pat: I'm still recovering.Lewis: You're just now recovered from after live events. It took you a lot of time. On a webinaryou could do three to four of those a day, or you could automate webinars and do much morethan that. For me, I can do a couple webinars a day and be out for maybe two hours afterwardswhere I just want to relax because I've been speaking for a few hours during the day, but I cansee significant results because I'm able to reach a much larger audience from all over the world.On webinars you really are able to connect with your audience or an unknown audience muchbetter, by giving them great value, great content and really just introducing them to you a lotbetter. When people can connect to you in that format, it's amazing and you can generate a lotfrom it.Pat: I've heard that webinars is the closest thing to actually being with a person in real life. Theother cool thing about it is you can do this from anywhere. You can be mobile. You can betraveling. You can still do a webinar if you just have online access. The other cool thing is thatanybody anywhere in the world can watch you. They don't have to travel either to come watchyou and be with you and hear you out.Now you explained that when Joel Comm contacted you he said okay come on my webinar, andyou had no idea really what that meant. Let's get into the content of what a webinar is and kind ofhow to go into the details and we'll talk about the software and different things like that. Howwould you answer the question to a total beginner who doesn't know anything about what awebinar is, what is a webinar?Lewis: Sure. It's a live seminar but just based online. So opposed to being in a room withsomeone where there's a speaker on stage, you're at your laptop and you're hearing thespeaker present their slideshow or their video live to you. So you can be anywhere in the world,they can be anywhere in the world and it's just like a seminar over the Internet.Pat: Is there any interaction involved?Lewis: Sure. Depending on the software and the solution you use, they try to mimic it as muchas a live seminar really where you can ask questions, so you can raise your hand just byclicking a button and say I want to ask a question. You can type into the chat box depending onthe software that you use so that you can ask questions that way.The person hosting the webinar can un-mute you so you can ask a live question just like youwould at a seminar if there was a mic. You can't control the screen or the slide that theyproduce, but they can control it as well. It pretty much mimics a live seminar, but it's just youwatching it on your computer.

Pat: Okay. Awesome. Let's say I'm new to this and I'm interested in doing webinar for myaudience. How do I set one up?Lewis: The software that I use is gotowebinar.com. I'm sure you'll probably be linking thissomewhere if people are checking this out on your website. I started using them, it's the firstthing I ever started using when I did my first webinar, and so for me I'm a little biased becauseI've been using them from the beginning. I've tested out other platforms and there are a coupleothers out there that are okay, but I feel like right now for the industry that I'm in, the onlinemarketing world, gotowebinar.com is the best thing out there right now. I really like that.The easiest way to set it up is using that. You go to gotowebinar.com. You set up an accountthere. There are trial accounts you can do for the first 30 days for free. You create you ownlanding page. So you basically just create a single page that they have the options for, choosingwhat you're headline or the topic of your webinar is going to be and you can fill out someinformation and then you have to take data from whoever is going to sign up. Your first name,last name and email is required, but then you can add any other data points you want to receivefrom people. You can make them free webinars or you can make them paid webinars. It alldepends on what you're trying to accomplish.Pat: Right. So you do free webinars to promote products right? But you could charge forwebinars too if you wanted to do that.Lewis: You could definitely charge. I've done a number of webinars where I've just charged 100per person. You can charge whatever you want obviously for the information you're giving away.I like the model where for me, I want to get as many people on a live Webinar as possible toexpose them to me and my information because I know once they hear my information thatthey're going to love it, and it's really going to help them and benefit them, and the more I give tothem, the more willing they'd be wanting to sign up for training or a service or an event I have inthe end.So it doesn't make sense for me to just charge only for information for people to get on because Ican still give them a lot of great teaser content and there's going to be more information they'regoing to need if they want to buy the training. So I like that because you can get more peoplethrough your funnel.Pat: Another question, this one's actually from a Twitter follower of mine who knew I wasinterviewing you. He was wondering if there was any free software out there for hostingwebinars or any options. Obviously, you're biased toward GoToWebinar, and I am too. I'veactually used GoToWebinar and I love it. But for those just starting out, is there any freesoftware of would you recommend trying out the trial version just to see what happens?Lewis: There's some free stuff. You can use LiveStream.com or Youstream.com. I've done

LiveStream and I know the CEO pretty well. It's a great company. It's just not built for a marketerto promote content via a webinar. You can still use it and share your screen and share yourvideo. It's cool for some things, but if you're trying to generate a transaction at the end of thewebinar, it's just a little more tricky and it's not as clean of an experience as a live seminar wouldbe.If you have a product for service, a coaching program, software, if you're trying to sell somethinglike that, you're more likely willing to use GoToWebinar.com. But the LiveStream or YouStreamis something you could definitely try out and give it a go just to experience being live on webinarwith people watching you.Pat: We're interested in doing a webinar. We picked a software. We'll say we pickedGoToWebinar, of course, and there will be links on the show notes atsmartpassiveincome.com/session29. If you want to go over there, I'll have an affiliate link forGoToWebinar if you're interested in that. So we want to set up a webinar. We create a landingpage. Now, that's done off of GoToWebinar, right? We don't have to go into our own website andcreate our own landing page.Lewis: You just log in the back-end of your GoToWebinar account, it just says, "Create aWebinar." You type in the information and it spits out a link for you with your landing page.Pat: Okay. So that link that they give you, that's what you use to promote your webinar.Lewis: Yep. And there are stats and analytics in the background telling you how many peoplehave clicked, registered, all their information right there as well.Pat: Okay, great. So when people click on that link, they go to that landing page and that's wherethey can enter their name, their email and any other information you want to collect from themand then they get registered on the webinar. Then you, as the administrator of the webinar, cansee that X number of people are signed up to attend that day. So how would you promote yourwebinar? You have your webinar set up, what are the best practices for getting more people toregister?Lewis: Sure. I guess it all depends on what your assets are at the time. If you have a list, thenthat's great, because you want to promote that list. If you have a social media following, that'sgreat as well. But some people don't have a list, they don't have a following, they don't haveanything. It's going to be a little more tricky. There are some things you can do to promote viaLinkedIn groups and Facebook events.Hopefully, a lot of people on here have at least a small following. You can either do Facebookads if you don't have anything at all, and that works pretty well for the lowest amount of price I'veseen to get people to sign up. But let's say you don't want to spend any money, but you have adecent sized list or somewhat of a list or some type of asset online you can promote to. Here's

what we do. We do a four day promotion cycle before the webinar. So you have the webinar,let's hypothetically say the webinar's at Thursday at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Standard time.You want to start promoting four days prior to any webinar, so this would be started on Monday.So you'd send out an email in the morning to your entire database, your email list, on Mondaymorning, whatever's the best time for you to send it out, announcing the webinar.You want to have a compelling headline and create some great copy inside the email for reasonswhy they need to sign up for this webinar--what they're going to learn, who's going to bepresenting, the time and a date the webinar. Maybe if you're going to give a free bonus to peoplewho sign up, what that bonus information is.You just want to give them the information of what they're going to learn, what they're going toreceive and benefit from being on this live webinar. And you want to make it feel exciting. If youjust say, "Hey, check out this thing I'm doing," the importance is getting people signed up andgetting excited about it before you're even on the webinar. So that's day one. You send an emailto your entire list.Day two, in the morning, you send an email to all the

Let's all please welcome, my good friend, Lewis Howes. Lewis, how are you today, my man. Lewis: I am doing fabulous, Pat. How you doing brother? Pat: Doing excellent. Thank you for coming on the show. I've actually had a lot of demand from the audience to h