How to Make Money from Webinars for Your Non-Profit
In the business world, online videos and webinars are frequently used for Internet marketing. The two most-common tactics are keywords and website mentions. Once you have created a video, you can upload it to YouTube or other video-sharing sites and then “tag” it with keywords
to help people would be interested to find it. Then, during the video or at its end, you can show the URL for a chosen website.
Here is an example for the non-profit world. The point of a webinar is to educate its viewers about a chosen topic. Now, say that your non-profit organization, for example, fights homelessness. You can use your development, marketing, or volunteer staff create a webinar that describes the problem of homelessness, its history, how it can be solved, and what people can do to help. Once the online video is created and uploaded, it can be tagged on the websites with keywords including “homeless,” “homelessness,” “fighting homelessness,” and so on. And then at the end the powerful, engaging video or at the bottom of the entire webinar, you can show a chosen URL.
And herein lies the potential for revenue and donations — you can use the video or webinar to market any website you wish. The obvious choice is the home page of your non-profit organization. But the potential is far greater. Your development or Internet team can create
a landing page — either as an interior page of your site or as a website unto itself — of your choosing. For example, the landing page can be part of your campaign for donations during the annual appeal over the holiday season. The landing page could be the site of your existing e-mail newsletter or print publication, thus encouraging more people to subscribe and snowballing your offline marketing efforts. It all depends on your chosen priority at any given time.
Still, it is likely that your non-profit organization, just like every other, is fighting for donations at a tough economic time. So, it would make sense for the video or webinar to direct viewers to a
fundraising page. If the video is engaging enough — and marketed well enough — to go viral or gain a large number of viewers, this simple marketing tool can have a tremendous effect. The production of the video using web-conferencing technology is the hardest part — but that, of course, could be funded by donors. The Internet-marketing aspect, however, is very cheap — it needs only time. And that short amount of time can translate in many more dollars for your
organization.