I love a webinar, in fact I’m getting quite addicted to them.  A webinar is an online seminar you do from the sofa, preferably with a cuppa and a biscuit to hand. Many of them are free, even if they are trying to sell you something at the end of it.  You can learn a lot in an hour.

If you have a blog, I recommend you sign up for Authority Blogger www.authorityblogger.com run by Chris Garrett, a stand up Yorkshireman now living in Calgary.  You can sit back and learn a lot from Chris’s dulcet tones. In the end I signed up, and paid for, his Authority Blogger course and I’ve seen increased sales because of it.

I did one with James Wedmore a couple of weeks ago on marketing using YouTube. At the end of it I came away with a YouTube cheat sheet which laid out the fundamentals of how to make YouTube videos work for you using keyword optimisation and a few simple rules (keep it short!)

I asked customers to send me in footage shot on their phones of their dogs eating treats I’d sent out to them. And this is one of the results (see below).

Now I have my own YouTube channel (a grand expression for 8 videos uploaded) and they’re sending traffic to my site.  I also embedded each video into the product page of the particular treat the dogs are eating so customers get an idea of whether a dog likes it or not and what size the treat is.  I shared them on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest.  They were repinned pretty quickly.

So give it a go.  You never know how a video can contribute to your sales, or just the feel good factor it gives people.  What you’re aiming for is to be at the forefront of people’s minds so when they’re ready to purchase it’s you then come to.  It’s great for customer engagement too and you have a laugh while you’re at it.

As I said, I’m lucky people like dogs so much.  If it’s widgets you sell you’re going to have to work at making it quirky enough to be passed around the net but that’s half the fun.