Screencasting for Fun and Profit
Modern technology makes webinars a terrific way to earn some money on the internet. Are you an expert in something? Do you love public speaking? Then hosting your own webinar, or web-based seminar, would be an ideal way to make money, potentially quite serious money – on account of the reach and scope of the worldwide web. Too fanciful? Tell that to serial entrepreneur Zalman Silber, whose simple idea of putting a little moviehouse at the Empire State Building has exploded exponentially into a string of businesses.
It’s all so simple – and simplistic, to be honest, that it almost smells of a rip-off, a tourist trap. For the New York Skyride, the cornerstone of his success (a star salesman already at famed New York Life Insurance Company, it was the Skyride that truly made him his first million), is nothing more than a half-hour “educational film” of the kind that children have to sit through in school, a movie about the history of the Empire State Building and some other famous New York City landmarks. That’s all. No “ride” at all involved, unless it’s to be taken for one where money is concerned! Yet it’s a perfectly legitimate, legal business, and it’s been operating for well over ten years now, so obviously somebody – a great many somebodies – are satisfied enough. And in all fairness it must be said that such success has since allowed Zalman Silber to offer much better tourist attractions, albeit in Australia, in the form of the Sydney Skywalk and The Edge in Melbourne.
But anyway, all that’s simply to say that regardless of how ridiculous the idea may appear at first, it’s difficult to say for sure whether it has “legs,” whether it will “run” or “hunt.” And a webinar is really inexpensive, relatively speaking, even if you do decide on pseudo-professional production values (for which there are a number of quite powerful software packages available, even for free, that should be able to help).
With only a minimum of monetary investment, you could start your own web-based seminar business on a topic that you’re an expert in. Come on, everybody’s good at something! Okay, maybe you’re no master craftsman, but the great majority of webinars or webcasts involve a basic to intermediate-level knowledge, anyway. Real master craftsmen (or master chefs or master carpenters or fitness trainers or weavers or what-have-you) are unlikely to tune into something on the web in order to increase their expertise in any case. Your likely audience would be beginners, whether complete beginners or beginners with some experience behind them who are ready to move onto an intermediate level of knowledge.
The most important thing in general, though, is SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. It’s the second decade of the 21st Century, after all, and you can be sure that all the experts are available already, online with their own sites and webinars established. It’s going to take some considerable SEO for people to be able to find you in the first place!