If you are running your own webinars, you are already ahead of most marketers online. If those webinars have people attending, you're even further ahead. But the next roadblock might be to get audience members not just to attend, not just to be alert but also participate in a webinar and in a multiple-week webinar class. To encourage audience participation, offer a challenge at the end of each lesson. Offer a deadline to promise and a finish and give a Q&A session as a reward.
A challenge means that after a particular webinar session is over, you assign them homework only it's more exciting and easier than homework. Give people a simple task to complete and give them some kind of a prize in exchange for finishing. If you are running a class about how to get a hardcover book published and the first class explains how to outline that book, the challenge might be to outline their first three chapters. If someone completes this assignment, they'll show you that they understand how to outline the book and they're well on their way to completing that outline.
It's important to make it an easy challenge and to make it fun. But how do you make sure they finish it? People need hand holding and what you should do is first make them promise they'll complete it. Make them promise they'll complete the steps but give a deadline to leave the promise. In other words, give people 48 hours to enter the challenge and tell you they will take it. After 48 hours, they can no longer take part in the challenge.
What happens here is people put themselves out there and write down that they will do the challenge and now if they fail to complete it they will feel guilty. They will look foolish and get embarrassed. So, it's in their best interest now that they've taken this first step of promising to now complete the challenge that they said they would do. After they have promised the challenge and the deadline has passed, make them specify a deadline in which they'll finish the challenge preferably within the next seven days. This way, they can complete the task while it's still fresh on their mind and they are still excited about doing this task.
Let's look at what's happened here. They've promised to finish but now how you get them to actually finish offer a reward. The best reward I've ever given is an additional one hour Q&A or question and answer webinar and all you do is answer the questions they came across while completing the challenge.
Do this every single week of your course and at the end of the course, post class rankings. For example, if someone completed six out of eight of the challenges, post their name in the list. Sort the list so that the people who completed the most number of challenges are at the top and those who completed the least number are at the bottom. This way, people will compete for status the same way people in high school or college compete for class ranking and the chance to become valedictorian.
To get maximum participation in a webinar class offer an easy challenge, make them promise a deadline to finish and offer a Q&A call as a reward.
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