Creating new digital products to sell doesn’t have to be like reinventing the wheel.
In fact, a powerful way to grow your business is to repurpose the content that already exists in your successful products and convert it into other profitable digital products.
More specifically, if you’re selling an ebook on your site, today’s tips are written for you.
We bring you four ways to repackage your ebook into a successful webinar, plus tips on how to sell it, so you’re earning more profit.
If you’re ready to get started, let’s get straight to it.
4 ways to convert your ebook into a successful webinar
#1. Convert your ebook into a live Q&A webinar
The first way for you to convert your ebook into a profitable webinar is to offer a live Q&A webinar.
If you enjoy engaging with your audience in real-time, this one may be right up your alley. Using the Q&A webinar format, your ebook readers can ask you in-depth questions about the topics covered in your ebook, which lets you expand on subjects beyond the contents of your ebook.
It’s a great way to make your audience members feel exclusive and like they’re getting a personal invitation to pick your brain.
Plus, with 92% of webinar attendees wanting a Q&A session at the end of a webinar, the demand for this format is there.
Besides that, Q&A webinars provide a great way for your audience members to experience live coaching from you.
By making yourself available to help solve your audience’s biggest problem in real-time, you bring great value to the table and position yourself as the expert on your topic.
Even if it’s a recording of your live Q&A webinar, you can still sell it to your audience, and they can still benefit from the live session.
For instance, check out Acquia’s Ask Me Anything with Dries Buytaert recorded live Q&A webinar, where registrants had the chance to ask Dries Buytaert, Drupal founder and Acquia’s CTO, anything about entrepreneurship, open source, and digital experiences.
And since it’s available as a replay, Dries’ audience can still benefit from the live discussion even after the scheduled event date.
This also gives him -- and you -- the opportunity to earn income from a live Q&A webinar after the fact by selling the recording.
So, whether it’s the live event or a recorded version, a Q&A webinar is a great format for sharing insights with your audience and positioning you as the expert in your field.
Answering your audience’s questions isn’t the only way to sell a profitable webinar, though. You can also ask key people from your book to answer questions, which brings us to another webinar format that your audience can learn from.
#2. Turn your ebook into an interview webinar
Another way to turn your ebook into a fruitful webinar is to sell an interview webinar that features relevant people starred in your ebook.
This could mean interviewing an expert on a related topic that expands on the research you completed for your ebook.
For instance, let’s say your ebook is about health and fitness. If you included a story in your ebook from a complementary expert to back up your points -- like a doctor, for example -- that makes for an ideal interviewee to feature in your webinar.
Just be sure to bring the conversation back to the focal point of your audience’s problem and have the interview webinar bring additional value to your attendees.
Think of the interview as a way to expand on the teachings of your ebook’s subject matter and give your audience exclusive insight that further helps them solve their problem.
Check out how Hubspot’s interview webinar, Advertising -- A Look Behind the Scenes, gives registrants supplementary info and an inside peek at how to solve their advertising issues.
It’s a four-part interview series that features advertising tactics and strategies from key leaders and digital advertising experts inside their brand.
Alternatively, instead of featuring an expert from your ebook, you can interview someone who’s become a relevant success story.
Whether it’s a success story that you included in your ebook or one that happened to someone after they read your ebook, this is a way to highlight an audience member who achieved the desired result your audience is looking for.
The beauty of interviewing a successful fan who solved their problem -- by following your method, of course -- is it takes on a testimonial role.
Which does wonders for your bottom line, considering testimonials build enough trust and credibility to generate 62% more revenue per customer per visit.
If you do choose this route, some testimonial questions to ask your star interviewee are:
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What was your experience like before you encountered our brand?
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What problems were you trying to solve?
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What did you achieve after using our product or service?
Keep in mind that you can use the content in your ebook to guide your interview webinar. Touch upon points covered in your ebook when asking your testimonial questions to make the subject matter relevant to your audience.
Or, better yet, scale the interview idea and give more than one expert the stage.
#3. Repackage your ebook into a panelist discussion webinar
The next way to convert your ebook into a profitable webinar is to repurpose your content into a panelist discussion webinar.
Rather than having one person give their point of view on your topic, this webinar format features an array of expert perspectives.
Check out how SproutSocial offers a panelist webinar, featuring leading marketers and VPs in the industry, in their CMO Fireside Chat webinar.
By signing up, registrants can gain access to a discussion about market predictions among a range of leaders in the field.
You can follow suit and, through your panelist discussion webinar, host a robust dialogue between various complementary experts related to your topic. Don’t be afraid to include yourself among one of the panelists to continue to position yourself as an expert in the field.
That said, it’s worth bringing up the concern that with more presenters involved in your webinar, the longer your webinar may be.
Generally speaking, it’s a good idea to structure and organize your webinar, so you don’t spill over your allotted webinar timeframe. It’s OK to plan a longer webinar, too.
These days, 58% of webinars run between 45 and 60 minutes.
Plus, longer webinars indicate greater value. In fact, 60-minute webinars attract 2.1 times more registrations than 30-minute webinars, and 90-minute webinars attract 4.6 times as many.
Basically, turn your ebook into a successful panelist discussion webinar by selling access to an intriguing discussion between complementary experts who are related to your industry and topic.
You get the benefit of tapping into their audiences, and everyone’s audience gets the benefit of a fresh new discussion. The more your attendees learn during your webinar, the better the results for everyone -- you, your bottom line, and them -- will turn out.
Nothing makes a greater impact in content marketing than education. Incidentally, that’s the focus of our final tip today.
#4. Repurpose your ebook into an educational workshop webinar
Another option for repurposing your ebook is to reformat it into a workshop webinar.
With 46% of webinar use cases being training, making it the top use case for webinars, transferring the educational content of your ebook to a workshop webinar is a natural option.
Just like Q&A webinars, educational workshops can be live, like Conversational Academy’s Live Webinar Series featuring eight live training events about writing techniques for conversations.
Or they can be prerecorded and offered on-demand, like Trello’s Remote Work Playbook for Team Success workshop webinar, which teaches registrants how to make the most of a remote team.
In either case, the purpose of the workshop webinar is to educate your attendees and give them a method for reaching their desired result.
Again, the goal should be to add value to your audience’s life. More specifically, after soaking up the takeaways and learnings from your tutorial, they should walk away with an actionable process for solving their problem.
And if you want to go above and beyond and inspire your registrants to actually take action on your teachings, present your workshop webinar with passion and energy.
After all, 32% of attendees feel the most engaged when the webinar host is passionate and energetic, so it’s worth putting in the extra zest to better help your customers.
The main takeaway here is to pull educational content out of your ebook and turn it into a workshop webinar, where your students not only learn how to solve a problem, but they also move forward with taking the steps needed to do it.
OK. That covers four options for you to choose from. After you have your webinar format fleshed out, it’s time to sell your webinar.
How to sell your webinar
To sell your webinar, the first step is to take care of logistics, like pricing and publishing.
As far as pricing goes, webinar fees vary greatly from $5 per webinar to $1,000 for a series of webinars.
Since choosing the right price isn’t always easy, it’s worth conducting market research to scope out what your competitors and other similar products are charging.
It’s also worth testing out different prices to see what works best for your audience. Keep in mind, when you test different price points, it’s important to offer different deliverables for different fees.
For example, if you look at pricing plans for SaaS companies, there’s a clear difference in what’s included between two plans testing different price points.
As for your webinar, this doesn’t necessarily mean you need to offer two different webinars for two different price points. One way to differentiate between your various webinar fees is to deliver extra bonuses with your higher-priced webinar.
While pricing your webinar may not be straightforward, publishing your webinar can be simple, especially if you use an all-in-one platform.
I may be (definitely) biased here, but an all-inclusive platform makes the process super streamlined. For instance, using Podia, you can publish your webinar by simply clicking the “new product” button under your “products” menu.
Then select the “webinar” from the modal box that pops up and hit “create & continue”.
From there, enter pertinent info, like your webinar name, categories, link, and pricing details.
And that’s it.
Of course, because everything on your website and product page is managed through a single dashboard, you can also upsell or bundle your webinar with your other digital products if you’re using Podia.
You can check it out for yourself with a free Podia account. Otherwise, let’s move onto marketing your webinar.
As for promoting your webinar, we recommend writing sales emails and sending them to your ebook purchasers and subscriber list in an email sequence.
Why sell through email?
57% of webinar registrations come from email.
Plus, 45% of marketers use email to promote their webinar, which makes it the preferred channel on both sides of the equation.
Keep in mind when writing your sales emails, it’s important to segment your audience into “like” categories and tailor your content to match your recipient’s stage of awareness.
In other words, address your audience’s pain point and how your webinar can help solve their problem, according to their awareness level, which can be broken down into five stages of awareness:
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Really unaware
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Problem-aware
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Solution-aware
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Product-aware
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Most aware
For instance, your ebook purchasers are in a completely different awareness and need stage than people on your general list of subscribers or prospective clients. Your ebook audience is more primed to purchase your webinar, so it’s important to address those differences.
If you use sales email templates to write your emails, it’s wise to customize them and personalize them wherever possible.
The reason for doing this is personalization goes a long way. In fact, personalization can increase your sales by 56%.
All this to say, it’s worth the effort to tailor your email copy, so it’s personalized to fit your audience’s individual situation.
Do so, and your webinar is much more likely to reach the people who need it most, and in turn, their loyalty and purchasing power.
Time to expand your impact and business with an ebook-converted-to-webinar
You can create and sell another profitable digital product without having to go back to square one. Just follow our four ways of turning your ebook into a successful webinar.
In a nutshell:
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#1. Turn your ebook into a Q&A webinar, where you share extra insights with your audience and bolster your position as an expert in your field.
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#2. Reformat your ebook into an interview webinar that features either a complementary expert in your field or success story.
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#3. Convert your ebook into a successful panelist discussion webinar and host a robust discussion among complementary experts in your industry and topic.
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#4. Transfer educational content from your ebook to a workshop webinar and teach registrants how to solve a problem.
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To successfully sell your webinar, once you price it and publish it to your online product page, send a sequence of nurturing sales emails to your audience offering paid access to your webinar.
Wishing you the best as you convert your ebook into a successful webinar of your choice.
