Nicole Baldinu is an entrepreneur, speaker, and multimedia producer. She has dedicated her independent career to empowering other small business people by sharing an education-based model of marketing and sales.
Nicole is co-founder and COO of WebinarNinja, an independent SaaS company, and producer of The $100 MBA Show, a “Best of iTunes” small-business podcast. She has spoken at various digital marketing conferences, organized the first webinar-specific conference held in the United States, and helped to build and manage her company’s remote team of two dozen professionals across four continents.
Nicole co-founded WebinarNinja and The $100 MBA Show with her “partner in business and life,” Omar Zenhom. Both were former educators who saw how entrepreneurs could modify teaching strategies for marketing objectives. Through bite-sized podcast “lessons” and live webinar workshops, Nicole and Omar show budding small business people how to monetize their unique experience and expertise.
Business and education trends have only reinforced Nicole’s teaching-as-marketing philosophy.
The ROI of traditional university-based business education, at a time when student debt is reaching crippling proportions, has come into question for many. Likewise, conventional marketing tactics fail to deliver the level of authenticity that today’s consumers expect. Consumers, Nicole believes, are looking for ways to learn practical lessons from individuals they trust on a personal level.
“The greatest value an expert can offer is empowerment,” according to Nicole. “We empower people with our practical daily podcast lessons and webinars, and our WebinarNinja users empower their audiences with useful webinar workshops. When the audience comes away with some wins, that has a greater impact on your authority than any other credential.”
To Nicole, that dynamic explains the popularity of webinars among online coaches and consultants.
The vision of entrepreneurs sharing practical knowledge in results-oriented ways informed the original premise of The $100 MBA, and found its ultimate expression with WebinarNinja, where users build their credibility by helping “students” who ultimately become customers.
“That’s where real consumer trust comes from,” Nicole says, “the feeling that you’ve been given the tools to help yourself, rather than simply being sold a solution. From there, it’s an easy decision for consumers to trust a ‘teacher’ with a real investment of their money.”
~Business Game Changer Special Promotion~
As COVID-19 has forced more and more business online, the value of remote teaching tools like webinars has suddenly become more clear than ever. WebinarNinja’s traffic has grown exponentially, and its user base has risen sharply, as non-digital entrepreneurs scramble to find a way forward.
Nicole and Omar quickly pivoted to creating resources for small businesses suddenly forced to adapt to the new realities of quarantine and social distancing. From creating new revenue streams online, to managing teams remotely, Nicole is uniquely positioned to help.
“The move to doing almost all business online isn’t just the result of social distancing,” Nicole says, “It’s just an acceleration of where we were already headed, and it won’t be temporary. For many businesses, the strategies we learn while we’re quarantined won’t lose their value, even after the pandemic is over.”
As always, Nicole Baldinu believes that the best thing we can do is keep teaching and learning. The results, she believes, will follow.
