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June 28, 2022, by Becca Klein

Episode #002: How to Sell Your Digital Course on Autopilot With an Evergreen Webinar Funnel

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*These show notes may contain affiliate links, which means that if you click a link and make a purchase, I may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. I appreciate your support! You can read my full disclaimer here.

There really is such a thing as passive income. And an evergreen webinar funnel is the prime example. It runs 24/7/365 and makes sales while you sleep.

But there are a lot of moving parts and it's hard to know how to put the thing together. That's where I come in.

In this episode, I'm peeling back the covers and letting you inside my super profitable evergreen webinar funnel that I use to sell my course, Break Into Blogging.

Let's dig in.

Here's a glance at the episode with some time stamps for you:

• 2:49 – Outline of basic funnel steps
• 6:50 – Creating your webinar
• 7:35 – Recording your webinar
• 8:40 – The substance of your webinar
• 10:16 – Pitching during your webinar
• 11:17 – Fast action bonuses (or “webinar bonuses”)
• 12:38 – Setting up your webinar platform
• 14:55 – Setting up your registration and thank you pages
• 16:00 – Sending pre-webinar emails
• 16:55 – Watching the webinar
• 17:39 – Post webinar emails + evergreen countdown timers
• 19:30 – Sales pages
• 20:27 – Checkout carts, bump offers, and upsells

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Break Into Blogging (my signature “how to start a profitable blog” course)
• My masterclass registration page
• Canva
• Creative Market (for slide deck templates)
• Blue Yeti microphone
• Easy Webinar
• Vimeo
• Leadpages
• Elementor
• ConvertKit
• Deadline Funnel
• Thrivecart

Other helpful resources:

• Blog post: How to Create an Evergreen Webinar Funnel
• Blog post: 7 Tools You Need to Create Your Online Course
• Blog post: The Benefits of Hosting a Webinar and How to Get Started

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Full Transcript

Hi there, I'm your host, Becca Klein of beccaklein.co. And I am really pumped to be talking about this topic today because it is one of my favorites.

So today we're talking about evergreen webinar funnels, more specifically, we're talking about using these funnels to sell online courses.

Now you can sell other things besides courses, you could sell an ebook or some kind of service, but generally speaking, these are used to sell courses. So that's what I'm gonna be talking about today.

My evergreen webinar funnel is the primary source of income in my business by far, but it took a lot of work to get it there. This was not something that I threw together on a Sunday afternoon. And all of a sudden money started rain raining down. It took a lot of optimizing and I'm still optimizing.

So it's a complex topic, but it's one that can absolutely really pay off and be so profitable.

So I want to walk you guys through it.

So the first thing I want you to do is I'd like you to actually see how this funnel works in real life. So I'm gonna have you sign up for my evergreen webinar funnel, go to beccaklein.co/masterclass. You'll see your registration page, totally free, sign up for the webinar. You can watch it later and then see what happens.

You'll see the emails that come before the webinar and after the webinar, you'll see the way I use timers. You'll see all the different pages. So you can actually see how what we're talking today about today really actually works.

So you don't have to do that, of course, but I think that it will be helpful learning tool if you do it. So again, the masterclass is at beccaklein.co/masterclass. All right.

So before we get into the details, I wanna kind of outline the basic steps of the evergreen webinar funnel.

The Basic Outline of an Evergreen Webinar Funnel

Recording your evergreen webinar

So first things first you're gonna record an automated or evergreen webinar. So you're not doing this as a live webinar. It basically sounds like a live webinar when you're delivering it, but you're actually just prerecording it on your own.

Now you could take a recording of an actual live webinar and make that your automated webinar. I wouldn't really recommend this though, because the benefit of doing an automated webinar is that when you get tongue-tied or take a weird pause or keep saying, um, anything like that, you can edit it out.

When, of course on a live webinar, you can't do that. So my recommendation would be to record it ahead of time. But if you wanna do, if you wanna use a live one, you can.

Setting up an automated webinar platform

Next you're gonna set it up in a webinar platform so that people can register for it. So the platform that I recommend and use is called Easy Webinar.

We'll talk more about it later. And it has an option for live webinars, which you're used to and automated webinars.

So when someone goes to that sign-in page that I was just talking about back at Kline deck host slash masterclass, and they go to sign up. They will have several times a day, like 9:00 AM, 3:00 PM and 7:00 PM, I think.

And they'll also have, what's called a “just-in-time” option. That goes by 15-minute increments. So for example, if someone signs up at 1:07 PM, it'll tell them the next time is at 1:15 PM. And if they sign up at 8:42 PM, the next time will be at 8:45 PM.

So they sign up for it as if it's a real live webinar. Now you're not lying to them. I mean, nowhere are you gonna say this is a live webinar. Cause it's not, that would be unethical, but it helps to have a kind of like feeling of a live webinar so that they feel like they actually have to show up and pay attention.

Registration and thank you pages for evergreen webinar funnels

Next, you're gonna set up a registration page and a thank you page. We'll talk more about those in a little bit.

The substance of the webinar

So then people watch the webinar at whatever time they signed up for. And during the webinar, you're mostly gonna teach educational content on a topic that relates to your course. So the bulk of it is really valuable, but then at the end you are gonna pitch your course.

And then at the very end, you're gonna take questions and answers for about 15 minutes. Obviously, it's not live. So these are gonna be pre prerecorded questions, but it helps to have people getting their questions answered.

Post-webinar emails

So assuming that they don't buy on the webinar, then for a few days after the webinar, maybe three days, five days, seven days, different people do it differently. But for a few days afterwards, they're gonna get emails, urging them to buy the course, going through what all the bonuses are, giving testimonials, overcoming your objections, all that kind of stuff.

And these emails are also gonna have countdown timers. Now these are really cool. They are, are, their timers are from a company named Deadline Funnel and they're evergreen timers.

So let's say that my evergreen funnel has a 72-hour period–after 72 hours, you can't sign up for it anymore. If Bob signs up at 11:00 AM on Monday, his 72-hour period is gonna end at 11:00 AM on Thursday. But if Susie signs up at 4:00 PM on Tuesday, hers is gonna end at 4:00 PM on Friday.

So every single person who signs up has their own unique deadline, and those go into countdown timers in the emails and also timers on the sales page. It's a really unique tool and it's a great way to create urgency for the course.

And then after they get all these emails, they check out the sales page. Hopefully, they choose to buy, but if they don't they're then gonna be locked out from buying again.

And again, that's Deadline Funnel. Deadline funnel has a setting where if, if you're past the 72 hours or whatever it is, you can no longer access that page. So even though you're on an automated webinar funnel like this, it actually is a real deadline because they will be blocked from viewing the sales page after their deadline expires. Okay?

So that's the basic outline of how it works.

An in-depth look at the evergreen webinar funnel process

Now we're gonna go more in-depth into each of those steps.

Creating your webinar

So your first step is to create your webinar. There are a bunch of different tools that you could use for slide decks. You could use Canva. If you're on a Mac, you could use Keynote. If you're on a PC, you could use PowerPoint. You could also use Google Slides.

Your slides don't need to be really, really fancy. In fact, in a lot of ways, plain is better. You don't want literally just a white background with black text on every slide, you know, use a little bit of design, but it doesn't need to be real intricate.

I recommend going Creative Market. If you, if you aren't someone who's great at creating slide decks, which I'm certainly not. They have tons and tons and tons of templates. And some of them are, are especially made for webinars like this. So they have really the exact slides that, that you need and they look great.

So I always recommend going to Creative Market for things like that.

To record it, you can use a tool like Screenflow. If you're on a Mac. Camtasia, if you're on a PC or Loom for anybody, any kind of recording software that will record your screen, cuz you're gonna have, of course your slides on your screen, optionally, you might choose to show your face in like a little bubble in the corner.

I don't do this on mine, but you could, there's no right or wrong. I just tend to like get distracted when I have my face on there. So I don't do it, but if you're fine with it, you could totally do that.

You might want to consider investing in a good microphone. You can use the microphone on your laptop, but it's not gonna be great quality. Even nice laptops, the microphones just aren't that great.

So the microphone that I use, the, what I'm using right, this second is actually called the Blue Yeti mic. You can find it on Amazon. It's roughly $120 give or take, at least at the time I'm recording this. So if you can afford to make that investment, it's a good one to make. And you can use this again on webinars, on Facebook lives, Zoom calls, you know, anything you're doing.

The substance of the webinar

So let's talk about the actual substance of the webinar. It's gonna be 60 minutes. Give or take. I've had some that are like 55 minutes. I, my longest one I think was an hour and 18 minutes. So somewhere in that vicinity.

And you'll have a few parts of the webinar.

So first of all, you'll have some intro slides. You'll have a title slide. You'll have a slide introducing yourself, a few slides, kind of talking about your journey from where you started to, where you are now, as it relates to the topic. This is not the time to talk about where you went to high school or, you know, tell your whole life story. They wanna hear how you got to be an expert in X, Y, Z, the topic of the webinar.

Then you're gonna go into the mistakes section. I like to have three mistakes that I point out. For example, one of mine on my webinar is waiting too long to start your email list. That's a mistake. And then I spend a few slides, probably three or four going through and explaining why this is a mistake and what they should do instead. So I do that for three mistakes.

Then it comes the real meat of the webinar. This is where you're gonna talk about your system or your framework or your process for doing fill-in-the-blank for achieving the desired result without undesirable results.

And this can be anything, but it should relate to your course. It doesn't have to be exactly on, on the same topic as your course. You don't need to be like teaching the course in the webinar, but it should relate because if it has nothing to do with the course, they're probably not gonna end up buying the course.

Then once you're done teaching, it's time to pitch your course. Now this is the part that most people are nervous about. And I definitely used to be. I'm better at it now, although I was still a little nerve-wracking, I think we automatically feel like, oh my G-d, I'm gonna sound really, really sleazy and salesy. And like a used car salesman, blah, blah, blah.

You just kind of have to take a deep breath and get over it and think about your webinar. You just gave them half an hour or 45 minutes of really valuable content for free. All they have to do now is sit through the pitch for your course. And if they hate so much, they can leave. No one's strapping them to the chair. So just think of it like that. And it'll help.

You're gonna pitch your course. You're gonna go through what all the modules are, what all the bonuses are. You're gonna state your refund policy, any other important policies like that you will, of course tell them how much it costs. If there's a payment plan, all that kind of stuff.

Then for the last 15 minutes, I like to do a Q&A, and I have an actual timer in my slides, a 15-minute timer that counts down and I answer questions for 15 minutes.

Now I also use something called a fast action bonus. Or you might also hear it called the webinar bonus. This is a bonus that, that they only get, if they enroll in the course before the webinar is over. So you wanna make it really juicy, something they're really gonna want, and they have to buy the course while I'm still talking in the webinar. As soon as the webinar ends, that sales page with that bonus goes away and they can still buy the course for the next few days, with all the emails they're gonna be getting, but they won't get that one juicy bonus.

You could also do this with a discount. You could offer a hundred dollars off or $200 off for the duration of the webinar, or you could do both and you can experiment, to see which works best now in your webinar platform.

At least if you're using Easy Webinar, I can't speak for every platform, but they have an option where you can pick. And the exact moment in the video where you want a little box to pop up, that has a mockup image of your course and says, introducing Break Into Blogging, something like that, and a button that says enroll now, or whatever you wanted to say.

So you can set that up to pop up, right as you start talking about the course. So people who are interested in it can just click that button and go right to the sales page. So you don't need to be telling them the link or anything like that. They just can click the button and go.

So that's the basis of how the webinar is gonna work.

Setting up your webinar platform (Easy Webinar)

Now, step two is to set up your webinar platform. As I think I mentioned before, my recommendation is Easy Webinar. They can do both live webinars and automated webinars.

I really like them. They're very reliable. They have that offer box that pops up. Like I just talked about.

They have, they have it set up so that you can send emails to people in between the time that they register and the time that the webinar starts. So prompting them, like, remember your webinar starts in an hour, et cetera, et cetera.

Tagging in Easy Webinar

They also have some pretty robust tagging options. So it integrates with ConvertKit, which is the email provider I use. And I recommend for everyone, it integrates with some other ones too. I dunno, all of them off the top of my head, but with ConvertKit, at least you can create a ton of different tags.

So you can tag people who registered. You can take people who attended; people who did not attend; people who attended, but left early; people who clicked on that offer box that popped up; and a bunch of other stuff.

So this could be really useful. So I can look in and see, okay, these people clicked that button in the webinar. They didn't buy yet, but these are really hot leads. They're interested enough to actually click that button. So maybe they're gonna get an extra email or two.

So this is really, really helpful. Now when you set it up, there's a bunch of different settings and I'm not gonna go through every one because it wouldn't really make sense without you being able to see my screen, but it's pretty self-explanatory.

Video hosting in Easy Webinar

You will need somewhere to host your video. You can't host it on Easy Webinar, but there's a bunch of different options for this. I use Vimeo, which costs, I think $7 a month. Um, I use this for all my course videos as well. It works out perfectly.

You can also use YouTube and probably a couple others too.

So you'll give people a few set times during the day that they can sign up. So 7:00 AM 3:00 PM, 8:00 PM, whatever you want and optionally, you can give them that just-in-time option, like we talked about before, or you can even give them an instant replay, meaning they don't have to wait at all. They can just click the button and watch it right now.

You'll wanna make sure that you have your Facebook pixels set up so that it's registering on the thank you page. And again, you wanna make sure that you set up all that tagging so you can keep track of what's going on.

Registration and thank you pages

Okay. Step three. You're gonna set up your registration page and your thank you page. Now, Easy Webinar does have registration pages and thank you pages. So you can use those.

I don't like to use them because quite frankly, they don't look that great. I really love the platform for 90% of the time, but they haven't invested in a really robust landing page builder.

So I prefer to build my landing pages, my registration page, and my thank you page on Leadpages. Here are some examples of pages I've made on Leadpages:

• Masterclass registration page
• Blog Beauty Tips guide
• Sales page for The Blogger Fastlane course

Another option is Elementor, but I really love Leadpages. And if you went to my link, earlier the webinar registration page that you saw, that was built with Leadpages and the way it works is that Easy Webinar will give you an HTML code to embed then you can either embed a button or an event widget.

So when you click the button on my sales page or on my registration page, rather that's a Leadpages' button. But the thing that pops up is from Easy Webinar. So you're putting that, what that information right into Easy Webinar, even though the page is built on Leadpages.

Setting up pre-webinar emails in Easy Webinar

Step four, you're gonna set up the emails that will go out before the webinar starts. So you could send these in ConvertKit, but I prefer to send them on Easy Webinar because in Easy Webinar, everyone who registers has a unique link with a bunch of letters and numbers, it's total gibberish, but it's unique to that person.

So you couldn't, you couldn't tell them that in ConvertKit, but with Easy Webinar, you can automatically insert that link. So I use Easy Webinar to send the emails before, um, before the webinar and you can send them out eight hours ahead of time, two hours, one hour, 15 minutes, you know, whatever you want, however you make sense to do to space it out.

But you wanna stay top of mind because it's really easy to sign up for a webinar. And then two hours later forget that it ever existed. I've certainly done that many times.

So you wanna start, try and stay top of mind as much as possible.

Watching the webinar

So next up they're gonna watch the webinar. Not everyone will, but a good number will, they will get tagged in ConvertKit or whatever mail provider you're using as either registered and attended or registered and did not attend.

So you can send different follow-up emails based on whether or not they actually attended during the webinar. Like I said, they're gonna have a fast action bonus, which means that if they purchase the course while I'm still talking, while the webinar's still going on, they get an extra juicy bonus or a discount or both. So like I said, most of the webinar is gonna be spent teaching.

Post-webinar emails from ConvertKit

They should leave feeling like they got really a lot of value out of it, out of it and learned a lot, regardless of whether or not they decided to buy the course, but you definitely are gonna pitch your course in that webinar.

So moving on to step six, assuming that they did not purchase during the webinar, they're gonna get a series of emails over the next few days, over five days for mine, you could do three days. You could do seven days. I've seen them all different ways, but let's say five days for this, for this example.

So over the next five days, they're gonna get emails from me using ConvertKit, promoting the course. I'm gonna talk about how great the bonuses are. I'm gonna say it has 10 modules that go over this and this and this. I'm gonna put in testimonials.

I'm gonna do an FAQ email that tries to overcome objections. Like one objection that I get for Break into Blogging is I'm really not a tech person. I'm horrible at tech. I can't do this. And I wanna overcome that objection and say, look, Break into Blogging, assumes zero tech knowledge. I use screen-sharing videos to show you how to do every single thing. You don't need to be a tech person at all. Most of the people in the course aren't et cetera.

So that is overcoming an objection that a lot of people have the actual content for all these emails will, will vary. I can't tell you email by email word by word, but you're gonna wanna send them out over the next five days or however many days you want.

Deadline Funnel evergreen timers

Like I mentioned before, these emails are gonna contain evergreen countdown timers from Deadline Funnel.

I explained how those evergreen timers work and you can embed them right in the email. You can also set it up so that if someone buys on day two of five days, they will no longer get those emails on day 3, 4, 5, because there's no reason to spam them. They already brought the course.

So in, in ConvertKit, you can very easily filter them out as long as you have them tagged. So for mine, anyone who enrolls in Break Into Blogging gets to tagged that says “BIB students.” And so I would exclude BIB students from all of those future emails.

Okay. Running into the home stretch here.

Your sales page and timers

So assuming they're reading those emails and they like what a hearing, they're gonna click a link and that's gonna take them to a sales page. I create my sales pages with Elementor. Um, the one that I use for Break into Blogging, I actually hired a designer to do since it's my signature course. It's like my most important thing right now.

My sales pages for lower-price courses are just on my own and I'm not a web designer, but they look okay. But the Break into Blogging one looks pretty good.

Elementor is really great for that. You could also use Leadpages or any other page builder. You could use Divi. You could use Thrive. There's a lot of different ways that you could do it.

It's gonna be a long-form sales page. So this isn't like a real quick three-section thing, unless your course is like $27, but assuming it's several hundred dollars, it's gonna be a long-form sales page. It needs to overcome objections. It needs to restate what they're getting and how valuable it is. It needs to convince them that this is the right product for them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We've all seen sales pages.

Checkout cart, bump offers, and upsells

So assuming that they're ready to click and enroll they're then gonna go to your checkout cart. I use Thrivecart, which I highly, highly recommend for many reasons.

And they can pay via PayPal credit card, I don't have the setup, but Thrivecart can also do Google Pay or Apple Pay. And I think one or two others that I have never really heard of.

And the final thing is that I give them two more options to upgrade their order on the actual checkout page will be what's called a bump offer, which is just a like very cheap little offer. Like, Hey, do you wanna add this on?

Mine is $17 for a big pack of Canva in Instagram templates, probably about two-thirds of the people who buy my course buy those templates, cuz it's a really easy like, yeah, okay. I'm already spending this money. I'll spend another $17.

And then after they hit enroll and they pay and everything, instead of going straight to the thank you page, they're gonna go to an upsell page, which offers them another product.

In my case, I offer them a blog audit for $79. It's normally $197 and I use Deadline Funnel on there so they can only get it for, I believe I have it said for 15 minutes. So they can't just sit there forever and think about it. So probably about a third of people end up purchasing that.

So bump offers and upsells are definitely ways that you can add a little bit more money onto the bottom line and they're a great way to do that.

So that's pretty much it! That is how an automated webinar or evergreen webinar funnel works.

Passive income or not?

I do wanna say that it is passive income in the sense that you're not like out there giving live webinars, which is fantastic, but don't think that you can just create it and then set it and never look at it again. You're gonna need to optimize it. And unless you're really, really lucky or I guess really, really good at what you do, the very first version is not gonna be the final version.

I've gone through multiple different sales pages. I've tweaked my webinar. Many times I've tweaked the emails. I've hired a copywriter and I'm always keeping an eye on the analytics. And if I start noticing that in email number four, barely anyone clicks the link. I'm gonna go look at email number four and see why.

So it's, it is passive income largely in that you literally will see sales come in while you're sleeping. It's very cool to wake up and have a bunch of Thrivecart emails in the morning. And like I just made $3,000 while I was literally sleeping.

But you do still have to keep an eye on it to keep it optimized.

Okay. So that's it for evergreen webinar funnels.

I know that I just talked a lot at you. I gave you a lot of, a lot of links. I'll link them in the show notes at beccaklein.co/002.

Hopefully it made sense. I do recommend that you sign up for my webinar at beccaklein.co/masterclass. Not because I'm trying to get you to buy the course, although you can, if you want. But because I think it will help you to see this in action to see how I have my registration page, my webinar, the emails you get, all that stuff. So go ahead and do that. It's free. It won't cost you a dime.

I will see you guys, same time next week. Bye!

That's it for today!

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