Simple Steps To A Powerful Webinar

The keys to a successful Webinar are selecting a valuable topic and content for the audience and having a good speaker. Follow these simple steps to conducting an effective Webinar.

1. Determine the goals of your event - educate clients and prospects, generate sales leads, launch a new product.

2. Determine a compelling topic that will make the right people want to attend

3. Choose your technology - You'll want a web conferencing solution that works with a variety of operating systems, is reliable, can scale to a large number of attendees, and has the features you need including polling, chat, Q&A, and recording.

There are two options for delivering the audio portion of your seminar: a teleconference call or audio streaming. Audio streaming is less expensive for large audiences and, depending on your web conferencing solution, the sound quality can be great. A teleconference works better if many of your attendees do not have computers. The drawback to a teleconference is that when the line is open for Q & A it gets very noisy and your questions may not get answered.

4. Select your speaker and meeting support team.

a. Speaker: It's best to have a speaker who is recognizable to the audience, credible and has good speaking skills. This may be YOU!

b. Moderator: A Webinar is much like a radio show to your audience. A skilled moderator improves the flow and feel of your event in several ways. A moderator will put a nervous speaker at ease with easy questions and prompts that will help them stay focused on their presentation. In addition, a good moderator can read the audience's mood by viewing the questions and comments submitted by online participants. This gives the moderator cues about speeding up the program, or taking time to answer pressing questions raised by the audience.

c. Support person: Have a support person on hand to handle any technical issues experienced by participants.

5. Select an appropriate time for your Webinar: For events based in the U.S., 10:00 am PST, 11:00 am MST, 12:00 pm CST, 1:00 pm EST is usually a good time. Skip Mondays and Fridays.

6. Establish your registration process: Streamline the registration process as much as possible - make it quick and easy. Online registration is effective and convenient. Also, make sure the technology can separately track who attended the meeting for follow up.

7. Engage in a mix of offline and online promotion early and follow up, follow up, follow up. Send confirmation e-mails immediately after registration and at least two reminder e-mails prior to the Webinar . 

8. Pre-seminar walkthrough - Practice your Web seminar with your speaker(s) and content at least once prior to the actual event.

9. Conduct your Webinar.

a. Join early - Presenters should join at least 15 minutes early to set up the presentation including any interactive content such as polling or Q&A.

b. Interact with the audience - Your content can be delivered with PowerPoint slides only or also include interactive polling and Q&A. Polling is the most popular method of increasing interaction. Once participants respond to a polling question, results can be shared with the entire group for further interaction. Many webinar conferencing solutions offer a chat feature so that participants can send questions to the presenter without interrupting the presentation. Interactive content is recommended when possible in order to keep your audience engaged in the seminar and it enables you to collect valuable information and feedback. Remember, keep your webinar educational and avoid sales pitches. Your webinar is not a sales fest!

c. Emphasize the main points: Annotation tools are a great way to emphasize what you are talking about at any given time. These tools allow you to highlight areas within your presentation and keep your audience focused on the subject at hand.

10. Collect feedback - Use the polling, Q&A and chatting transcripts to learn about your audience and develop a post-event FAQ.

11. Archive for playback - By selecting a Record and Playback option, both the audio and the Web portions of the presentation are synchronized for future playback, further extending the reach of your event.

A personal conference center is an ideal way to hone your webinar skills and produce pre-recorded, 24/7 "infomercials" for your business, product or service. It's also great for customer service, business meetings, sales presentations and just keeping in touch with friends and family. Get your own web conferencing center today.