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Good morning and welcome, welcome, welcome. It’s Mike Stewart, dot live my I’m Mike Stewart, the internet audio and video guy. And today I want to talk about I don’t have a guest today, but I’m going to do a little presentation about something that, I think is an opportunity that we should all look at. And number one, I’m going to be calling it virtual event template.com. The site’s not done, I just bought the domain name and decided on the name. But basically what this is, is this is the ability to create virtual events. And so you know, what is a virtual event, a virtual event is the ability to have presenters is the ability to sell tickets to the event, it’s the ability to do selling, and generate leads have more higher ticket items from an event. It’s like it is an online seminar. That’s exactly what it is. I used to speak at a lot of online seminars. And, you know, because of the pandemic, those things have, have gone to the wayside. So therefore, virtual events are not are they not not virtual or physical live events, you know, have really suffered in the last year. And of course, the world has scrambled to know how to meet virtually that’s why things like zoom, and GoToMeeting and Google meet. And oh, shoot, there’s just all kinds of ways that people have been building the ability for multiple people to get together virtually without, you know, leaving their home through their phones and their computers. And why not? So anyway, I just wanted to document what I’m thinking about. I’d love to have your questions and your feedback. Obviously, if you have any questions, you can submit a question about anything at Mike Stewart dot live, you can actually call my cell phone number 708263662 if you have any questions, but anyway, today’s discussion is going to be about virtual events. And of course, this is the website that’s not built yet as of today. But I plan on working on this over the next couple of weeks. But it’s all based on a little tour I’m going to give you right now. And of course, one of the things that I researched is, you know, what is it that people are looking for, you know, and I thought, is it a virtual seminar? Is it a virtual workshop, you know, well, the term everybody is looking for, is virtual event in a virtual event platforms and companies. And of course, from looking that you can Google that there are all kinds of companies popping up to do virtual and what’s called hybrid events. And, you know, it’s, you know, become very popular because of the pandemic. So anyway, virtual events is the key word. That’s why I named what I’m working on virtual event template, because I’ve built a template and, and I’ll show you what my template does. And what this experience came from Anyway, when I started researching, you know, the way to do this, you know, I heard about a company called hop in, because a stream yard and hop in, you know, is all about being the platform for virtual events. Now, I don’t have anything against hobbyists at all. I think I actually attended their webinar. They’re a great company, they have a great system. But I think it’s a little overkill. And one of the things that that you can make a judgment for yourself. For me, it was a little expensive for what I got. And everybody can’t justify that. In fact, they’re going after a bigger corporate market, you know, you see their business enterprise I want to talk. So once again, I’m not saying this is not a good company, if you have the budget for it, if you’re a corporate, big corporate decision maker doing virtual events, I think this is a great solution. One of the reasons I like copying is it integrates with joint stream yard. And you know, in fact, they’re using stream yard as the presenter law delivery mechanism. So in other words, you can have presenters from all over the world and you can use stream yard to interface with with hop and in fact, I believe hop in bought stream yard is invested money, which means streaming or is only going to get better and better because this is a big corporate client. They have

you know, they’ve been very successful in the last year because This growing need for more and more virtual events. And so, you know, their market is doing fine, and their platform is great. But I said, You know what, I’m gonna figure out how to do this with WordPress. So let me show you what I did on a shoestring budget. Basically, I use things already owned. So the reason I wanted to talk about this is we own my partner how Coleman and I on February 13, of this month, built a domain name, next level PCL marketing. That’s the name of our event. So step one, we bought a domain name, and created a sales page. And we did that, and WordPress. And so basically, there it is, is the headline, just like things I’ve been doing for years, there’s my partner how doing the sales pitch, a Buy button, using our shopping cart that we already had, talking about that, in the past, we used to do this event, as a live event at a hotel. But because of the pandemic, we’re doing it virtually this year. So in other words, we had, we have a niche and a market that we’re saying we’re having a workshop for. And so we built the sales letter, we told them, what they’re going to get, it was a one day event that Hal and I were the presenters, and for a very affordable price, that you could click the buy button and pay us to get access. So what happens is, is we were charging $97 for each seat, and it was very profitable, we sold a lot of seats. And we basically were doing we were selling WishList Member, which is what I use for my membership site. So So when people go to attendee login, they they’re able to after they pay, they’re able to create a username and password. And when they log in, then they see the dashboard. This is kind of an inspiration from hop in. When you log in to their system, they have a menu of events. And so there was the session and links to each of the sessions. But what we did is I built a page per session that’s protected, those were protected pages that the only way people could get to those these sessions is if they had paid for a password, a membership. And then we had recordings from the previous year. So we really beef this up to be a good value for 97 bucks, and we went live. And we had told the times on based on eastern time we went live and people came here and they hit the play button at specific time. And that’s where we use stream yard to stream our live sessions. And basically what I’m doing right now, we just charged money to embed each of these sessions. And then when we were done, the sessions were recorded. There you can see there’s me and how you can say yes, and we just did our presentations, like we were at the stage of an event. And when that was over, we took a break. And we said come back and meet us at 11am and 2pm, and then 330. And then we did a zoom networking meeting where everybody just logged in to zoom and we talked overtop of each other. And it was a little bit of chaos. But any right, I’ll show you what I used to be able to build this. And so if we go into the dashboard of WordPress, you can see that number one, we built a built all of my session pages as individual pages in WordPress. And I got a plugin that I really liked a lot called YouTube Pro. And YouTube pro allowed me to embed on those protected pages. an unlisted private YouTube stream that I used stream yard to stream to. So that’s how the only way people could watch this stream was if if they came to the embedded page. And you know, so what I like about it, and I’ll show you how you build a page, you go in here, and you hit add new and WordPress. And you know, you want to title your page, I’ll just title it test and you hit YouTube Pro. And then it has a wizard and says Do you want to embed a live stream and one of the other things that it did is if you put the link to the

to the stream which YouTube will give you that and you hit Submit then on the page It will bring the video, you have to publish the page to make it work. But it is that simple. And it is YouTube creates the link that you are able to paste in the YouTube pro plugin. And then as you can see, there’s the the live stream ready. And of course the chat is disabled because the live stream has already already happened. But if it was a up and coming up and coming live stream, then that chat would be there on the page. So what we were able to do is we were able to sell tickets to this live event, we want to make it easy for people to navigate and show up. It was easy for people to chat and comment with us. And we did it all with nothing more than a simple WordPress website. Building pages in WordPress, simple pages, not complicated pages, using stream yard, to have our guests show up, just like I’m doing right now presenting the screen, I could, you know, we left ourselves on the camera so people could see us. And we just went through our PowerPoints we pulled up instead of pulling up a web browser, we pulled up the PowerPoint, and we we did our sessions. And then at the end of the session, we took questions and then when we were done, that page was already populated with the that session. And at the end of the day, then all the sessions were recorded. By using WishList Member that was how we were able to protect the page, I’ll go back and look at this page. And if you’re not familiar with WishList Member, great software that allows you to sell membership content. So and and what we did what I did there was let’s see here, find the page, there’s the page I just test pages built. And then you’re able to go down here and you can say who, for instance, this was the 2021 event people that was only the people that paid for that access, and it protects it. And that way, only the people that paid for that content would have access to those videos. So I essentially did everything you do in a virtual event. It’s not as fancy as some of them I’ve seen out there where it actually gives you animations of being in a convention hall. We’re not trying to do that. Basically, what we did was we built content, and we sold it to our niche. And then now we’re continuing to sell it. And it was interesting, you know, about a third of the people that paid showed up, two thirds of the people wanted to watch it on demand later. And you know, that’s okay, that’s if that’s what they choose to do. Nope, no problem. don’t have a problem with that at all. And let’s see if there’s anything else I want to share with you. I’m gonna trash that page, because that’s not something I want to leave in there. And so if I was to tell you all the different things I had to make this happen, it was a domain name, a WordPress website, the YouTube pro plugin, the WishList Member plugin. And if you don’t have a shopping cart, I have web dot coms power system cart, that’s what I use. But you could use PayPal only you could use stripe, you could collect any money you want to you can use your existing shopping cart if you have it. But we were able to do the pretty much the same thing that some of these big virtual event companies are charging 1000s and 1000s of dollars for we were able to do it for free. So any rate, just one let you know this particular presentation is going to be is brought to you by virtual event template.com which I’m going to build the training step by step on how I built next level PCL marketing, which like I said, was just happened to be the name of of my event with my partner how and it was pretty, pretty simple how we did everything but it worked. It was profitable. It generated new business and so the story of how I built this step by steps gonna be coming out in the next couple of months under the domain name virtual event template. If you have questions before then you can always you know, go to Mike Stewart dot live and you’ll have updates there and of course, to get WordPress domains and

and hosting domains you control.com and dot live secrets are the sponsors of today’s show. So what All that being said, I’m gonna see here, we got a couple of comments. And thank you, Bill. And thank you Roger for I know there’s a lot going on in there. But it’s, it’s not so much that you can’t get control of it. That’s, that’s why I call my business domain control. And if you if folks don’t have any whole lot of other questions, I just wanted to document in today’s show Today’s a little bit of a short show. Because I believe virtual events are going to be opportunities that are here, you know, they’re here for us online. And then more importantly, you know, the, we’re not going to be able to meet in person, anytime real soon, until the pandemic gets under control. I don’t think people feel confident and safe to travel and go to hotels and meetups. So with virtual events, you know, it all boils down to naming it, building it, making an offer that’s irresistible. And then of course, when it gets into marketing it, that’s a whole nother discussion for another day. But But the truth is, how did we market this? Well, we have been doing podcasting, and live streaming, and Facebook groups and paid advertising, we’ve been doing everything in the world to build an audience of pest control owners. And that’s who bought this, and that’s who we’re targeting. And, you know, so we found a little niche that we have carved out for ourselves. And that’s how we marketed it. And you know, and so, you may already have a following, you know, may already have a list or, you know, you may have something that you have to spend advertising dollars to to build a list. And, you know, there’s the only thing I can guarantee you is, when you do it this way, at least you can save a lot of money because you’re able to sell an event and produce the event for very inexpensive tools. Like, you know, wishlist members, not that expensive. Stream yard join stream yard is not that expensive, and hosting for WordPress not that expensive. So we’ll take a look and see if there’s any other questions. Well, here’s a good question from Jeff, how many of these could you create as many domain names as you can buy? With with stream yard, you have an unlimited streaming with, you know, hosting and WordPress domains, you know, builds, you can have multiple sessions, you know, we’re doing that already, we will have multiple sessions probably every year, under this domain name, so there’s no limit. That’s one of the things I didn’t like about the more expensive platforms, they limit you to the amount of registrants they limit you to the amount of sessions you can have per month. And this has zero limits, you could you literally could have 100,000 attendees, if you could sell that many, so any right. And thank you, Roger, you know, I’m always learning to effect that’s the attitude we should all have. Always be learning. So with all that being said, if there’s no other questions, I just wanted to say virtual events, I believe are an opportunity for people who are willing to master some simple tools. Once we’re meeting again, in person will virtually be a profitable option. I think that that there’s always going to be a hybrid, I think people are going to want to start meeting again, but the hybrid sessions where, in other words, there’s going to be follow up, and there’s going to be bonuses that are going to be done virtually. The beautiful thing about doing virtual events is is you know, there are a lot less costs, you can do them more often. And you can do a hybrid, but until till we are meeting again, you know, this is definitely a skill worth talking about.

Tom says have domain renewal costs been going up. I guess it depends on who your registrar is. I don’t think there’s an across the board costs going up. There was one a few years ago, whereas when I sell domain names, I had to increase it, because the wholesale price went up. But I don’t think anything’s going up in the last couple of years. But do a private message to me and I’ll look into that for you which concerned about.

So, folks, this has been Mike Stewart from Mike Stewart live and if there’s no other questions, folks, have a great day.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai There may be typos, please excuse