Picking a Niche and Selecting Your Topic

Picking a niche or choosing your topic is going to be the most important thing that you do when it comes to your webinar. You probably already have an area that you are an expert in since you are considering the idea of a webinar, but you may not know what specific topic you should choose. In this chapter, we will use some examples of niches, topics, and webinars in order to give you the tools that you need to choose the right topic. The subject of the webinar is one of the biggest attractions that attendees say convinced them to go to the webinar.

Step #1 Know Your Niche

Okay, so you want to find a topic for your webinar. What is your niche? You probably already know it but if not then think about what it is you do for a living, what you are most passionate about, or what you are most knowledgeable about. This is probably your niche.

For example, Steve is a marketing director at his company and his passion is making money online. So, his occupation combined with his passion means that his niche is internet marketing, a very general term that describes many of the ways to make money online. But it is perfectly okay for your niche to be a very general term. In fact, the more general the better, because that means you have a far wider choice of topics.

Step #2 Determine What People Want to Know

What do people want to know about your niche? What kinds of questions are they asking search engines? If you want to run a successful webinar then you need to find out what people want to know so that you can teach them.

For example, suppose that you wanted to do a webinar on ‘making money online with Hubpages.’ This web 2.0 platform was quite popular a few years ago for making some money online but it has since gone by the wayside and been replaced by better ways to make money. The point is, no one is going to be looking for a way to make money from Hubpages, and even if you know how, it does you no good if no one wants to listen.

Instead, you have to figure out what sort of topic people are looking for. Our example entrepreneur, Steve, has decided that he is going to present a webinar on ‘making money online with…’ but he’s not sure what comes after the ‘with’.

Step #3 Decide What You Are Good at

Your next step is to decide what you are good at so that you can teach it. Of course, you could always hold a seminar on something that you don’t know anything about, but it would be difficult to present and you would have no credentials that make audiences want to listen to you.

So, for instance, if you were particularly good at building websites or doing graphic design, or writing professional copy, think of ways that you can incorporate that into making money online. In our friend Steve’s case, he has an aptitude and a passion for link building and he can get a site to rank number one for a non-competitive keyword in just a few short months. Steve has decided that he is going to call his webinar ‘How to Make Money Online Using Micro-Niche Websites.’

Step #4 Build up your Expertise

Anything that you can do to impress people with your credentials will improve the odds of them coming to your webinar. Have you been working in the industry for a long time? Do you have a college degree that is relevant to whatever you are teaching? Have you taken any certifications or courses on things relating to your particular topic?

You may want to consider adding more education or experience if you can. This may not be possible, but sometimes you can get certifications that look impressive but you have to do very little for them, such as pass a test online or complete a two-week correspondence course. Whatever you can do to make yourself seem like an eminent expert on your topic will help you attract people to your webinar.

Take the case of Steve. Steve has some information that he can put into a bio that makes him sound like one of the top experts on making money with micro-niche sites. Take a look at what Steve came up with for his webinar bio:

Steve Eddings is an expert in building and marketing niche sites with over 30 years in the industry. He has used niche sites in his work with telecommunications giant Condale Ltd. for more than 15 years and has been approached to help rank niche sites and improve the link profiles of some of the top Fortune 500 companies.

Step #5 Publish Your Expertise & Promote Yourself

Now, you need to publish your bio on the web and start making your name be seen as associated with this niche. This isn’t hard to do. For one thing, you can simply outsource a few short books and put your name on the cover, and then publish them online and you can add ‘author of more than X books on niche marketing’ to your bio.

You can also create videos that show off your expertise so that when people are searching for certain things in niche marketing, your YouTube videos come up, showing you as an expert in that field. Of course, there are always opportunities to publish articles on the topic online, and many sites will even allow you to guest post on their blog if you have good content.

Just remember, this isn’t to promote your webinar. We will dive into that in the next posts. This is what you need to do before any promotion even begins. When you start promoting your webinar, people are going to look you up and try to figure out if you know what you are talking about. This online expertise profile will give you the credibility that you need.

Images courtesy of:
DavidRockDesign, Tumisu, Pixabay

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