How Charging for My Webinar Made Me $917,000 in One Month
Dan Henry explains why a paid webinar scales more easily than a free one, using three principles of funnel economics.
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Big Idea
The argument in one line.
A paid webinar beats a free one in competitive markets because the ticket recovers ad spend, lifts show rate and attention, and puts real customers in the room when you pitch.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
A coach, consultant or course seller running ads to a free webinar and watching registration costs eat the margin.
A founder with a small audience in a crowded market who needs a funnel that pays for its own traffic.
Someone planning a live event or webinar who wants to know when and how to place the pitch.
SKIP IF…
You have a huge organic audience and no ad costs, so recovering ad spend isn't your constraint.
You want a step-by-step build tutorial. This video makes the case for the model and points to a paid event for the how-to.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Dan Henry says one automated paid webinar turned $162,000 in ad spend into $917,000 in cash. His case rests on funnel economics. A free webinar pays $10 to $15 per registration, gets about a 25% show rate and pitches freebie seekers. A paid webinar recovers 50 to 100% of ad cost through ticket, bumps and upsells, gets a 75 to 95% show rate, and holds attention because people paid. Pitching people who've already paid, as his client did for $250,000 at a live event, converts best. The real lever is a topic people will buy a ticket for.
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Spending $200 per registration, the Paid to Pitch event pitch, and the sign-off.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
Free webinar registrations cost $10 to $15 in ads, so you are in the hole before anyone shows up.
A free webinar gets roughly a 25% show rate, while a paid one gets 75 to 95% even with weak reminder emails.
Charging for the ticket, plus bumps and upsells, can return 50% to 100% of your ad spend before the pitch starts.
The person who can spend the most to acquire a customer wins, and a paid webinar lets you afford a $200 registration.
Paid attendees stay through crashes, bathroom breaks and tech failures that would empty a free webinar.
Attention isn't earned on the stage. It's bought at the door.
Teaching too much on a free webinar kills sales, but a paid audience gives you more grace to over-teach.
People with goals keep investing, so if you don't offer them the next step they'll buy it from someone else.
Even a free webinar should have a paid offer on the thank-you page to claw back some ad money.
The topic is the real secret: if people won't buy a ticket for it, the paid webinar model doesn't work.
Takeaway
Charge for the room, then pitch it
WHAT TO LEARN
Charging for a webinar ticket recovers ad spend, fills the room with committed buyers, and makes the pitch land on people who have already paid.
A free webinar costs $10 to $15 per registration and pitches freebie seekers, while a ticket turns attendees into customers and returns part of your ad budget immediately.
Bumps and upsells before the thank-you page can push ad recovery from half to nearly all of your spend, which lets you bid more per registration.
A paid ticket drives a 75 to 95% show rate and keeps people through technical failures, because they paid to be there.
Over-teaching hurts a free webinar but is forgivable on a paid one, since paid attendees extend more grace.
People who have already invested in you are the best audience for a high-ticket offer, as a $250,000 live-event pitch to a room that expected no sales showed.
If you can't charge, put a paid offer on the thank-you page, and spend your effort on a topic people would actually buy a ticket for.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Funnel economics
The math of what each step in a sales funnel costs and returns, which decides how much you can spend to acquire a customer and still profit.
Show rate
The share of registrants who actually attend the live webinar.
Bump
A small add-on offered at checkout, before the buyer leaves the order page.
Upsell
A larger follow-up offer shown right after the first purchase, before the thank-you page.
Backend offer
The main higher-priced product pitched at the end of the webinar, after the front-end ticket.
tight reframe with no setup needed→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
00:00
“We spent $162,000 in ads to our webinar and we made $917,000 back cash, not revenue.”
specific numbers cold open→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
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So recently we had a month where we spent $162 ,000 in ads to our webinar and we made $917 ,000 back cash, not revenue. And we did it with one automated paid webinar, not a free webinar, a paid webinar. So people actually paid for a ticket to attend the webinar.
And I wanna break down the math for you on this, because this is what took my business from around 200 -ish a month to 917 ,000 in four months. And to be honest with you, throughout my 13 -year career, the most money I ever made was with paid webinars. Now listen, I am not putting down free webinars.
I've made a lot of money with free webinars. But when you are in a competitive space, when ad costs are high, when you don't have a huge audience, a paid webinar is just much, more forgiving due to something called funnel economics and when you understand funnel economics you'll see why it's much easier to scale with a paid webinar than it is a free webinar And I'm gonna break down all of that in this video.
By the way, my name is Dan Henry. I'm the founder of getclients .com. And in my career, I've done about $45 million in sales for my own products and services, mainly with webinars.
So if you enjoy this video, please hit subscribe. I am desperately trying to get that silver play button from YouTube and hit 100 ,000 subscribers. And it would mean a lot to me if you'd smash the subscribe button.
All right, so principle one. When you do a free webinar, you're pitching to leads when you could be pitching to customers. All right, so think about it this way.
When you run ads to a free webinar, you are gonna pay 10 to 15 bucks per registration. So you're already in the hole. You've already spent money before the webinar even happens.
And then you're gonna get like a 25 % show rate because we all know that the show rate to free webinars is dismal. So now you get a fraction of the people that you paid for in the room and you have to fight to keep their attention because if you don't have a really good webinar, by the time you get to the pitch, you've lost people.
So now you have even less people. And then when you go to pitch or book a call or whatever, now you're still pitching to leads and many of them might be freebie seekers. They're just there to get free information.
And so your sales are lower. But when you do a paid webinar, here's what happens. You spend money on ads.
and you get a portion of that money back immediately because they're buying a ticket to your webinar. And then if you have additional offers like bumps and upsells that they can buy before they get out of that funnel and get to the thank you page, well now you've got even more money back. So the chances of you getting half, 75%, 80%, even 100 % of your money back is much higher than a free webinar because you're not doing that at all on a free webinar.
And if you absolutely must do your webinar for free, at least have some sort of paid offer on the thank you page to, again, get some of your money back. Okay, so where are we at now? We have got some of our ad money back, maybe all of it if the topic of our webinar is good, and now we go to show rate.
So because people have paid for a ticket, you're gonna get 75 to 95 % show rate automatically, even if you don't have great show up email sequences because people paid to be there. I mean, when's the last time you bought a ticket to a movie and you didn't show up? And the thing is, people that pay, pay attention, and people that pay attention pay more.
Because they paid to be there, they're gonna stay for the whole thing. And you have actual customers in the room. Who do you think you're gonna make?
more sales from. People who have not paid. anything to your company, or people who have already become customers, already given you their credit card number, already paid.
Which one do you think is going to convert higher? I'll give you three guesses and the first two don't count. So this is funnel economics, right?
So you can have the absolute best coffee shop in a small town, and it will never make as much money as a mediocre coffee shop in the middle of Seattle, where there's millions of people walking by. You cannot fight the economy. If you charge for your webinar, you are attracting customers, you are getting some of your ad money.
back. You are getting better show up rates. It just is superior.
You can't fight the economy. You can only pick which economy you're in. Now, the real secret to this is the topic.
If you crack the topic of your paid webinar, that's where people will actually buy a ticket. And that's where you're going to be able to scale. This is how we spent $162 ,000 in ads and did $917 ,000 back in sales.
Why? Because when we had people in the room, they had paid to be there. We got most of our ad money back.
So the people that bought the backend offer, the thing we were selling at the end, it was all profit. I mean, minus like my software and staff and whatnot, but still like massively.
profitable. All right, so principle number two, people that pay, pay attention. And people that pay attention, pay more.
So let's go back to the movie ticket. How many times have you been sitting on your couch and you saw a trailer for a movie and you saw something in that two -minute trailer that you didn't like? So you didn't buy a ticket to that movie.
That's probably happened to you hundreds of times. But when's the last time you bought a ticket to a movie? You went in, you got your popcorn, you got your drink, you sat down and you saw something in the first five minutes of the movie you didn't like.
Did you get up and leave? No, because you paid to be there. I mean, unless it was the Blair Witch Project, but that one aside, I doubt that's ever happened to you.
And so yes, on a paid webinar, you will get a higher show rate for sure, but you will also get more grace. For instance, one time, this was during COVID. Tony Robbins decided to do his Unleash the Power Within or whatever on Zoom.
So he had so many people come on Zoom that at that same time I was running a paid webinar and it crashed. Like it literally crashed Zoom. We had to switch to GoToWebinar and we didn't know how to use GoToWebinar.
So like we had all the attendees go over there. It was a disaster. We couldn't get the thing working.
And then Zoom started working again. So we brought... People back over to Zoom.
It was an absolute mess. Now, if that was a free webinar, we'd be screwed. We'd lose probably almost everybody.
But because it was a paid webinar, we didn't lose anybody. Literally not one person. They paid to be there.
They wanted the event. So they came back. I mean, the amount of times I have had to go to the bathroom, and I've said, listen, guys, I'm going to be honest with you.
I've got to go to the bathroom. Give me two minutes. I go to the bathroom.
I come back. During a paid webinar, nobody leaves. I would not do that on a free webinar, honestly, because people will leave.
because they didn't pay to be there. And so if there's any other reason to do a paid webinar, it's to save your bladder, because I don't know if you're anything like me, speaking for a long amount of time, it's an issue. And so write this down.
The principle is simple. Attention isn't earned on the stage. It's bought at the door.
If you can simply charge for your webinar, all of these problems that you stress out over with free webinars just suddenly disappear. And for me, I would much rather just solve all these problems at once rather than trying to deal with each one of them. individually.
And that brings me to the third principle. And that is the best time to pitch is after you've already been paid. So one of my private clients, his name is Mario.
He's a personal development and relationship coach. He was doing an event in Mexico and I was actually attending the event because his stuff is awesome. You got to understand that.
He already had charged a decent amount for these tickets. I think they were like a thousand bucks or something. People had flown out to Mexico.
They paid for flights. They paid for hotel. They had already invested a lot.
And I said to him, I said, man, are you going to pitch anything? And he was like, well, no, I'm not going to pitch anything. I said, well, why not?
He says, well, people have paid a lot to be here. They've already invested a lot. 20 % or so of them have already bought the thing that I would pitch.
I just, I don't. think anybody would buy it, like maybe one or two people. And so I said, okay, well, Mario, you've invested a lot.
You're a private client. And just so you guys know, I charged $200 ,000. I raised it recently from 100 to 200, but I charged $200 ,000 for private coaching, like one -on -one.
So I said, man, you're a private client. I'm happy to write a pitch for you for this event. All you got to do is say it on stage.
Will you do that? And he was like, okay. All right, I'll give it a try.
So I give him the pitch and he ends up doing it. Again, he thought one or two people would buy, but he ended up doing over $250 ,000 in sales from that event. People got up, walked to the back, grabbed an order form.
It was glorious. It was beautiful to see that happen. And that is because like, dude, if you have somebody that's already invested in you, whether that's a paid webinar, a live event, something they've already bought from you, you have to understand that people have goals.
They invest in their goals. And if you don't have anything else for them to invest in, they will go and invest with somebody else because they want more help. Dude, I've been doing this for 13 years.
I still continuously invest all the time in sharpening my skills and learning more and more about my craft. I'm never going to stop spending money on this. Even me, somebody who's like a veteran in the industry.
And so if they don't pay you, they're gonna pay somebody else. And if you truly believe that your stuff is the best, give them an opportunity to invest with you instead. Why would you wanna send them to somebody else?
And that's why I love paid webinars so much because people have already paid. They've already said, hi, I'm willing to invest in myself. You're giving them genuine value because here's the other thing.
When you teach too much on a free webinar, it will kill sales. But if you... accidentally teach too much on a paid webinar, you have more grace.
Like you can kind of get away with it and you will still make a ton of sales. I mean, I wouldn't overteach and complicate things because then you definitely will kill sales. But the point is paid webinars give you so much grace to make mistakes.
And when you've already been paid, that's the best time to pitch. You're literally pitching to people who have already said, hey man, I like to pay. To get help with stuff.
Do you have an offer? No? Okay, great.
I'm going to go give it to somebody else. No, dude. Like, make the offer, man.
Make the offer. I never would have thought people would have paid me 50 grand for a day of consulting. I had dozens of people do it.
I raised it to 100 grand. I never thought people would pay me 100 grand for a day of consulting. I've had dozens and dozens of people do that.
I raised it to 200 grand. I never thought people would pay that. Guess what?
They still are. And because I charge more, I can genuinely offer more.
Like literally, I wrote an entire pitch for his event. I can't justify that for somebody that pays me like $10 ,000 for a coaching program. I just can't.
I can't make the time, man. I got a family. And so not only should you pitch something, but you should also offer something at a high level.
Mario had a private coaching program that was really expensive and people took it because they wanted personal time with Mario, just like people want personal time with me, just like people will want personal time with you. Make the offer.
And keep in mind, man, when you charge for a webinar, you're getting your ad. Like this is like, to me, the biggest unlock. You're getting a lot of your ad money back.
So the profitability goes through the roof. All the funnel economics make sense. You get your money back.
You're getting better people. They're showing up. It just makes sense.
Don't. pitch to get paid, get paid to pitch. And that is how we were able to scale to these numbers because we did a paid webinar.
Now here's something that'll really bake your brain. Imagine instead of spending $10 to $15 to get somebody to register for your webinar, you spend $200. Now you might think, oh my gosh.
That sounds terrible. But see, we can spend up to $200 to get someone to register for our webinar because on average, we make $200 when we get someone to register for our webinar. And the person that can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins.
We have upsells in our funnel. So we make, I'll put a screenshot right here, we make money when you register. We make it back.
And you can too. And so listen, I am so excited about this that I'm actually gonna do a one. day virtual event.
It's eight hours long, and I will be diving into how to create a paid webinar to scale your business and how to come up with a fantastic topic people will pay for so that you can get paid to pitch. If you're interested in that, check the link in the description and grab a ticket to my paid to pitch event. And I'll leave you with this.
Maybe you feel nervous about doing a webinar or a paid webinar or whatever it is that you feel nervous about. Warren Buffett said that risk comes from not knowing what you're doing. And I promise you, by the end of paid to pitch, you will know exactly what you're doing.
It's time to make funnel economics work for you so that it's not so hard to scale your business. Stop paying for the room and start getting paid to pitch. Anyway, please subscribe.
I want to hit my 100 ,000 subscribers. It would mean a lot. I hope you guys enjoyed these videos.
I'll see you in the next one.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Dan Henry opens with the number: $162,000 in ads, $917,000 back in cash, from one automated paid webinar. The rest of the video explains why charging for a ticket changes the math.
Frameworks
Named ideas worth stealing.
01:14list
Three principles of paid webinar funnel economics
Pitch customers, not leads
People that pay, pay attention
The best time to pitch is after you've been paid
A paid ticket recovers ad cost, raises show rate and attention, and sets up the pitch to buyers who have already paid.
Steal forany ad-driven webinar or live event
CTA Breakdown
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
11:34product
“Check the link in the description and grab a ticket to my Paid to Pitch event.”
Pitched after the value, tied to the video's own thesis, with a Warren Buffett line to handle fear of running a paid webinar.
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Dan Henry lays out ten emotions a prospect has to feel before they buy anything, built around one line a mentor gave him at a half-empty hotel event in Tampa: people buy when they feel like buying.
A creator who's generated $40 million over thirteen years explains why his revenue collapsed for years, and the three principles that brought it back — none of which involved a new funnel.
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