Webinars are chock full of useful information, I’d like to tell you my secrets to get the most out of them so you can leverage them to make more money. A great webinar can teach you something in an hour that could take you years to learn. If you are not attending webinars in your niche, I highly recommend you start.
Choose the Right Webinar For You
This is probably one of the most important points. You will be doing a lot of work to learn the information that was presented in the webinar, so it needs to be relevant to what you need. Don’t just attend every single webinar on the internet if you want to be able to maximize the information.
A few questions you can ask yourself are, what will this webinar help me accomplish? Do I have the interest to pursue the information right away that is being taught? What do I hope to get from this webinar right now?
There are so many webinars out there, if the webinar is something you plan on implementing in the distant (notice I said distant and not near) future, hold off on attending that webinar because if you don’t use in right away, you may forget the information. You will be wasting your valuable time that could be spent on a webinar that specifically solves a problem that you need right now.
Sticking to an area that you are ready to learn and work on right now is a great way to get the most out of webinars. Webinars are a big investment of time, and it will take a few hours to fully grasp the information that was presented.
Don’t let that time commitment scare you, because this investment in time should pay off in either cold hard cash or some other type of big benefit for you.
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Don’t Miss the Live Session
The live portion of the webinar is really important to catch if you would like to ask questions or sign up for some type of additional free or discounted product. Usually when there is a webinar, there is some type of extra incentive for live attendees. At the end of a webinar, there a Q and A session which is a great place to get some of your burning questions answered.
More often than not with the webinars I have attended, there was more of a benefit to attend a live session because of some sort of freebie or an extra discount on the paid program. If it is a topic you are super interested in, it’s best to attend the live session to get the most benefit.
Listen to the Replay
It’s important to attend the live session, but the replay is super important too! It’s best that you do BOTH. You will find things that you missed during the live session, and things you didn’t quite understand will become more clear during the replay.
The replay is a great place to take notes, which brings us to my next point.
Take Handwritten Notes
I’m a huge note taker, it comes almost as naturally to me as breathing. I can much more clearly understand and retain information if I take notes. Studies have shown that note taking by hand and not a laptop yield far better retention and understanding of information.
Keep All of Your Information in One Place
At the moment, I have been studying Pinterest strategies for my blog. I have been attending webinars and I have a notebook specifically for Pinterest. There is so much I need to learn about Pinterest and I want to have all of my information in one place. You probably won’t fill up an entire notebook from one webinar, but you can add all other information you learn on that subject into that same notebook. Your notebook will be a resource for everything related to that subject.
If you are learning a bunch of smaller topics, you can keep all of your information for all of those topics in one single notebook. There is no need to have a hundred different notebooks lying around unless it’s a huge topic that warrants the need for it’s own notebook.
Here are a few extra tips on using a notebook to get the most out of webinars:
- For your combined topics notebooks you can separate the topics with page markers. I use washi tape, post it’s or page flags to separate my subjects when I keep them in one notebook.
- Be creative and have fun with your note taking notebooks, make them pretty and you will want to use them more often.
- Leave a few pages blank at the beginning of the notebook so that you can put in a table of contents and any other pertinent information.
- Number your pages. When you go back to list your table of contents the numbered pages will be very helpful.
- Write the name of the person conducting the webinar, the name of the webinar, the date, and the hosts website. Information changes and it’s great to keep the dates to know how relevant the information is.
- Cross reference each sub topic. For example, in one webinar I learned about rich pins, then later I watched a YouTube video about rich pins and it expanded upon the information. So when I took the notes on the YouTube video, I jotted down the other page numbers that had information about rich pins to cross reference.
- For each slide shown in the webinar, Make a sub heading with the information written on the slide. This will separate your notes in an understandable format.
- Use a highlighter or different colored ink for your notes.
I don’t do too much great note taking during the live webinar, because I want to pay attention to as much as possible and not miss anything, however during the replay, I am constantly pausing and taking notes!
I know my note taking may seem a little excessive, but if you are serious about learning something, this is the way to go. These tips have helped me get so much out of webinars, and it is amazing the difference in how much information I have learned as opposed to just watching a webinar and taking a few notes.
Go back over your notes once the webinar is over while the information is still fresh in your mind.
You can fix anything you find in your notes that needs editing and help it to make more sense. Go back over your notes periodically, you took great notes so don’t be afraid to use them!
Attend at the Webinar Until the Very End
Good questions get asked at the end of the webinar during the Q and A which is at the end of the webinar. You can find valuable bits of information if you stick around and don’t exit the webinar before it has ended.
There are so many great webinars out there, if you use this information, you will get the most out of them and in turn use that information to improve yourself or your business. After all, isn’t that why you attended the webinar in the first place?
Be Teachable
Obviously if you are attending a webinar you want to learn.
Even if you are very familiar with a subject, we can always learn from someone. When you are open to learning, you can always find useful information. So even if you know mostly everything that is being taught in the webinar, there will surely be SOMETHING new that you can learn.
You don’t need to go all out taking copious amounts notes on things you already know, but surely there is one nugget of wisdom you can find that can give you an extra edge.
Share the Wisdom
If you are going to be attending a webinar, why not let your followers on social media know about it? They might like to join in the webinar as well. The person who created the webinar put a lot of time and effort into it, why not share it?
Perhaps you will one day be an affiliate of the person running the webinar’s program. You never know what can come of networking, but it’s always a good idea to help your fellow content creators.
Learn Something New Everyday
Workout that learning muscle everyday and learning just gets easier and easier. My mantra for February is to learn something new everyday. I’ve always been a learner, I love to learn and soak up information like a sponge. Since I have consciously set my sights on learning something new about blogging and business every day, my results have been incredible!
Because this mantra has worked so well for me, I’d like to offer my readers a free download of digital art print I designed to be a beautiful reminder to “Learn something new every day.” Just enter your name and email address below and you will be directed to a page for your free download. Just enter your name and email address and it is all yours.
Let me know in the comments what are your tips for getting the most out of webinars.
