How To Conduct An Effective Webinar

Webinars are an economical and effective alternative to “brick and mortar” physical address meetings.

They allow companies to expand their reach, target more people more often, and offer a completely captivating brand experience.

Webinars can be successfully used to generate and qualify sales opportunities and market for the brand of seed, rich messaging content, training of employees, partners and customers, collaboration and productivity within the organization.


Check out the tips and methods I have discovered to help conduct an effective webinar.


To make your online seminar a success, you must plan for it as you would any event you were conducting in person.

This allows you to successfully run the meeting itself and use web conferencing technology as a tool to provide additional benefits that typical location based events cannot come close to matching (interactivity among guests and speakers, no limitation on attendance due to the size of the meeting area, etc.)

Be sure to create the webinar in such a way that you would want to attend it yourself.  After all, if you don’t want to attend, you can’t expect others to either.

Webinars allow you to create an online conference to meet the specific needs and interests of any group of people who are not based where you are geopgraphically.  This gives the option for real time conversing based on the shared interests among the participants.

Try identifying groups that make more sense to target and deliver informative content just for them. You will want to recruit speakers that can add value and desired resources to the meeting. You will need to decide if you want to request that they leave all sales pitches out based on the reason for the webinar, etc.

Participants may not be signing up for a timeshare presentation, they may simply want to learn something new when they spend their valuable time with you.  So be sure expectations are set from the outset for both the particpants and the presenters to avoid confusion and dissapointment.

Make sure to have informative charts and graphs for visual viewing as you give your presentation.  This can help with added value and will help those following along not to get lost along the way.
Address your attendants by name and watch for any “hand raising” if you decide to allow questions while the information is being presented.

Note that people usually really appreciate getting documents or copies of the webinar emailed to them after the event.

Webinar Programs and Online Solutions:

GoToMeeting:
There is more to GoToMeeting than just “meetings”, They also offer GoToWebinar and GoToTraining.

These solutions cover smaller groups to very large groups. They offer a 30-day free trial and now offer iPad solutions.

WiZiQ:
I love this place!!! Free eLearning classrooms which can also stand in for webinars.

If you want to learn, you are sure to find a class here. If you want to teach, they offer great options for that too. WiZiQ even allows you to test and grade your students.

They also offer an API and Moddle WebConferencing. You have the ability to offer either free or paid-for-access classes/webinars.

WebEx:
Online meetings, specialized solutions for webinars, video conferencing and online events are offered by WebEx. It’s great for eLearning also.

There are a vast number of downloadable and online solutions for conducting great webinars. Go to Google and type: Webinar Solutions for even more!

You will have more than enough to choose from. Enjoy and webinar away to a happy and growing business.