Did you know that webinars are being ranked consistently by experts around the web as one of the top ways to present information? The webinar has become such a model to success partly because it is (kind of) new and partly because the way webinars are designed promote good communication between speaker and listeners.
There are thousands of people out there that are turning webinars into actual revenue for them, increasing their customer base, building marketing and email lists and in general, increasing their success by using webinars. In this report, you’ll learn everything you need to know to be successful with webinars in seven easy steps.
Step One: Choose a Platform
The first step is choosing a platform to host your webinar on. This has to be done before anything else because the equipment that you set up and the type of presentation that you prepare will all depend upon the limitations of the platform that you choose. For example, you can’t get a webcam for your webinar if your platform doesn’t support live video streaming.
The best way to choose a platform is to look at all of the features that the most popular applications offer. Some of these include the ability to stream video, screen sharing, statistics tracking and reporting, chat rooms, mobile access to the seminar and much more. Decide which features you absolutely need and then decide what your budget is. Then you can begin weeding out platforms that don’t meet your needs.
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If you need a starting point, some of the most popular webinar platforms on the market right now include WebEx by Cisco, GoToWebinar, ClickWebinar and AnyTalk. There are also budget platforms that cost nothing at all to use but are limited because they aren’t really set up for webinars, but can be used as such with the elimination of many of the standard webinar features. These include Skype and Google Meet
Step Two: Gather Your Equipment
You are going to need some equipment if you want to host a webinar. These vital pieces of hardware will allow you to make your webinar run smoothly and look professional while you are conducting it. Let’s go through the required equipment list piece-by-piece in order from most important to least.
Your Computer: You need a good computer if you are going to host a webinar. You don’t necessarily need to run out and buy a new, state-of-the-art computer intended for graphic intensive business applications unless your own computer performs very poorly.
What you need to make sure of are things like CPU speed and multiple cores – a quad core at the minimum. You also need a sufficient amount of RAM, with 4 GB being the absolute minimum and you’ll want to make sure that you have a solid soundcard, video card and Ethernet port on your computer.
Your Internet Connection: This one has just a couple of very specific requirements: you need to have a wired connection, not a Wi-Fi connection, and you need to have a lot of upload and download speed. 10 Mb connections are the starting point for running webinars.
Your Webcam: If you plan to use streaming video during your webinar, you are going to need a good HD webcam that sends out a professional video feed to your attendees. Anything less than HD is considered unprofessional in this day and age.
Your Microphone: A good USB microphone that has the quality that you want for a webinar (for about $100) is the Blue Yeti. However, there are other choices too. Get a really good microphone though that sends out a very clear, very professional audio stream. Don’t rely on your laptop microphone or a cheap USB mic.
Step Three: Plan Your Presentation
Your next step in the process will be to plan your presentation. This can be challenging if you have never hosted a webinar before. However, if you follow these steps you will have a presentation that is worth presenting on launch day.
1. Decide upon a topic: You need to know what you are going to present if you want to proceed with preparation. It should be something that you know about and can be regarded as an “expert” in as well as something that people want to learn and will allow you to pair with a monetization model.
2. Decide what multimedia you need: You want to have some slides prepared or any other multimedia that helps you make your point. Create all of your multimedia well in advance so that you have time to practice with it.
3. Become familiar with your platform: You need to make sure that you know your platform very well, which means that you need to practice with it, play with it and especially, conduct test runs with your webinar. Read all of the tutorials for using the webinar platform and make sure that you are using it to its full potential.
4. Write a script: You’ll need a script to follow, with your slides or other multimedia factored into it. This doesn’t necessarily have to be followed completely but it will give you a framework to lean on to make sure you don’t get lost during your presentation.
5. Record Yourself: Make sure that you are recording yourself doing practice webinars so that you can see how you appear to others. Getting some friends or colleagues to watch your webinar and give you tips for improvement wouldn’t go amiss either.
Step Four: Promote Your Webinar
Now, we’re going to discuss promoting your webinar. Promotion is one of the most important aspects of hosting a webinar because there is very little point in holding one if you only have a handful of attendees. Here are some strategies that will help you promote your webinar better.
• Always be Promoting: You can promote your webinar a thousand different ways in your life. You can add a link to your registration page in your email signature, you can go to all of the forums you frequent and change your forum signature to include a link (which makes all of your past posts carry the same registration link) and many other creative ways to advertise your upcoming webinar.
• Start Early: You should have been building your email list for months or years before your webinar preparation, but in case you didn’t, start getting email addresses and sending out reminders for registration as early as you can.
• Promote Often: Once you have an email list, begin promoting your webinar often. Make sure that you remind people at least three times in the final week or two leading up to your webinar. Most attendees register within the final 10 days of a webinar release and you want to give them every opportunity possible to get their name on the list.
• Use Other Avenues: You don’t have to just use email to promote your webinar. Use everything you can think of, from email signatures to social media, including forum profiles, which have the advantage of updating every post you have ever made on that forum with your new registration link.
Step Five: Decide Upon a Monetization Model
The fifth step is deciding how you are going to monetize your webinar. There are a lot of options out there and each webinar is unique so it is impossible to recommend a specific one. However, there are two basic ways that people make money from their webinars.
• Charging for Them: The first way that people make money from webinars is by simply charging admission for them. This may or not be the model for you, but keep in mind when you are just beginning to do webinars, it will be hard enough to get people to attend your webinar for free until you build up a fan base. You are going to make it 100 times harder for yourself if you start out by charging – unless you truly have something special to share.
• Other Revenue Streams: Just because you don’t charge for admission doesn’t mean that you can’t make money from your webinar. There are actually hundreds of ways that you can make money from hosting a webinar that have nothing to do with charging people to attend. Here are a few of the options that you have:
· Publish an eBook and promote it during your webinar
· Take your eBook and combine it with audio and video content and create a “course” worth hundreds of dollars
· Promote someone else’s product on your webinar and get a commission
· Include Amazon affiliate links to products that people need to host a webinar and then hold a webinar on how to hold a webinar.
Step Six: Conduct a Dress Rehearsal (and Promote Some More)
Your next step is to do a dress rehearsal the day of, or the day before, your webinar launch. This is a very important step because it allows you to work out all of the kinks that you will undoubtedly face when you are presenting. Doing the webinar the day before allows you to simulate the same conditions (such as time of day) when you will be holding your real webinar and can help in many other ways as well.
• You will be able to make sure that all of your technology is correctly plugged in and working
• You will go through your slides and find out if there is anything missing, anything that you haven’t timed correctly or slides that need to be edited because they are wrong somehow.
• You will be able to relax more in your actual webinar because you know that you have already gone through it once and were able to get through it.
• You can feel at ease no matter how many problems there were with the dress rehearsal because any theater geek will tell you that a bad dress rehearsal means a perfect performance.
You also need to promote your webinar some more at this point. Most people sign up in the final week of the webinar, so you want to make sure to send out emails, even if you only have a day or two remaining until your webinar begins. Give people every opportunity to register at the last moment if you have empty slots and in fact, discount your admission price (if you are charging admission) by 75% or more during the last few days and fill those slots. Getting a little money for those “seats” is better than getting no money for them.
Step Seven: Host Your Webinar
Finally, you can host your webinar. On launch day, make sure that start getting ready about an hour before. You don’t want to be coming in from work at the last minute and sit down to do your webinar. You need to have some time to acclimate to your session and prepare so that you can release that feeling of pressure.
Have a great time hosting your webinar! Remember to smile and present your information with confidence. People need to feel as if you are an expert in whatever topic you are presenting and that you completely believe in whatever you are teaching. Follow your script at first and then explain things further when the opportunity arises. You can always come back to your script if you get lost.
Make sure that you take questions from your audience at some point. Remember, one of the reasons that people attend webinars is that they think that they will have an opportunity to ask questions of the presenter.
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