The Webinar Strategy That Built My Business

The Secret Weapon Nobody Is Using Anymore

Let me tell you about one of my favorite marketing strategies of all time. I've been in the marketing game now for close to 20 years, and I can tell you I've been able to build enormous businesses on the back of webinars. This business where I'm recording right now, my marketing agency with 120 employees, servicing some of the best brands out there including my own family business brand, was built with my webinar strategy.

Going back to 2017, webinars were a big deal. Actually, even before then. But people have stopped doing them at the level they should. And still today, they are a massive opportunity. As I was creating my next webinar for a Black Friday special, I realized not enough of you are doing webinars. So I want to give you the reasons why, show you the basics of putting one together, and show you how AI can build the whole thing for you.

Seven Reasons to Run Webinars in 2026

Reason one: authority building. When you do a webinar, it establishes you as an authority. You're a professor. You're an educator. People automatically feel that you have something to teach them.

Reason two: audience connection. On Instagram, somebody watches a video for three seconds and that counts as a view. One, two, three. Those people are not interested in your products yet, but social media reports it as a view and you get this vanity excitement about it. On a webinar, people are actually there consuming your content. You have a connection at a level you will never have on social media at scale.

Reason three: lead generation. And I highly recommend you do not sell these webinars. You give people the opportunity to connect with you in exchange for their contact information. Give me your email, give me your phone number, and I'll give you my value. It's a fair tradeoff. The money's in the list. I've produced millions of leads for my brands over the years through these webinars, and I've turned those leads into millions of dollars and real growth for these businesses.

Reason four: repurposing content. What a great excuse to sit down and deliver an hour of content. Your team, or even AI agents in this era, can turn that hour into YouTube episodes, podcast episodes, graphics, carousel ads for Instagram, you name it.

Goodwill, Captive Audiences, and Practice

Reason five: goodwill. Because you're giving value to people. I've written books, done content, done seminars, but because of the amount of webinars I've done, people come thank me all the time. Most people that attended my webinars did not buy something from me, but they got a lot of value. I've literally had people say, "Manuel, for the first time ever, I bought something from you, but I've been attending your webinars for four years." It gets to the point where these people feel it's time to give back.

Reason six, and for me one of the most important: a captive audience. Do a YouTube live with a thousand people on the stream and by the end you might show 6,000 or 10,000 views, because people fall off after a few seconds and new people rotate in. Those people are not captive. On a webinar, whether you use Zoom or GoToWebinar or whatever platform, people are in a room you control, and generally 80 to 90 percent of them stick to the end of the content. That's a very important rule on webinars.

Reason seven: practice. Your ability to communicate gets better. I don't even want to show you my earliest webinars because they're probably very embarrassing. It's just like riding a bike, just like any sport. The skill gets developed. If you want to build a legacy as a content creator, you've got to practice, and webinars are a great opportunity to practice delivering a message. That one is mostly for you, and in the end it helps you create a bigger impact, especially as a personal brand.

The Checklist That Saves You the Pain

I've run a lot of unsuccessful webinars while discovering the elements that need to be in place every single time. So I put together the checklist we run in-house at my agency, for my own webinars and for client webinars.

Strategy and planning: define the webinar topic, the goal, and the offer, outline the target audience, and create a timeline for before, during, and after. Copywriting and email creation, because you have to promote it: post on social media, email people, and when you're just getting started, do one-on-one texts and emails to get the ball rolling. Landing pages are very simple to create these days with tools like ClickFunnels or GoHighLevel, especially with the birth of the AI era. Then set up automations: when somebody registers, they get a confirmation email, and one hour before the slot, they get a reminder. These elements are crucial. Add advertising and traffic if you have budget, because you want people to actually show up.

One more thing on presentation type. I've done potentially thousands of webinars, and 99 percent of them have been value-based webinars. It's been very rare that I do a pitch webinar, where I already have an audience and say, come over here, I have a special offer you don't want to miss. Pitch webinars work when you already have an audience that knows and trusts you. If you don't have that yet, you don't have the right yet to do a pitch webinar. My webinars have all been built on value, value, value, with an offer to be part of my next level of engagement.

Let AI Build Your Slides

Here's how I'm using AI to build my own webinar decks, and this works in any AI tool you want to use. I open a new chat and I talk to it: I want you to act as a PowerPoint expert. First, give me a mega prompt that I can feed back to you so you can produce the presentation. I want it based on my book Marketing Magic, which you've already studied, from the lessons I learned from my father to the content marketing strategy to becoming omnipresent. I want 18 to 20 slides max, blue colors in the background, the AGM logo on every slide, and an offer at the end.

It gave me the mega prompt with everything structured: audience, core promise, slide structure, speaker intro, the opportunity, the zero to hero story, the omnipresence framework, tone and voice, all of it. Then I fed that prompt back, said yes, generate it in PowerPoint, and downloaded the deck. No human being was involved in putting together this presentation. How to build a powerful personal brand without ads. The agenda, the attention era, the myth of paid ads, paid equals short-term, organic equals lifelong trust. It even pulled my contact info from my website and suggested bonus offers on its own. It had the Frank Suarez story from my book at zero to 12 million, which I can now correct, because we've exploded well past that since I wrote it.

Then I take that PowerPoint, tweak it a little, add some images, and just like that I have a webinar I can deliver. You've got to start somewhere. Everybody started with zero. At one point I hadn't done a webinar, and now I've done hundreds if not thousands of them, done millions of dollars of revenue through them, and expanded my businesses with them. Get started, implement what we covered right now, and build a booming business on the back of great webinars.