How to Run a Webinar

With virtual offices and webinars gaining ground rather rapidly in a business world enamored of the Internet as well as speed, reach, and lowering costs, it's probably a good idea to know how to host a successful webinar.

To begin with, you'll want to have chosen your webinar hosting vendor with great care. They're not all alike, and the differences between them can be astounding. Among the cream of the crop are Webex and GoToWebinar, but look them over carefully. Look for the widest scope of customization and active customer care and guidance, along with the best price deal for what injury claims get.

In fact, try to get a vendor that offers you consulting services, so that you learn from the start how to host a great webinar. It's auto insurance quotes if you're going to use webinars that you build a reputation for professionalism and creativity. Find webinar hosting vendors who have the most experienced staff. You should also bring in an industry expert or a client or a business partner to take part in the webinar and help you develop it. You want this content to be the best of the best. Keep them simple but creative and dynamic; encourage participation from the audience. Promotions or sponsorships can help peak interest and offset costs. Use multimedia; dare to be different from the typical business presentation PowerPoint. You can use PowerPoint, but use other things, too, like little movies, flash animation, photography, and so on.

Test the running of the software prior to all webinars. You never know if you have something that needs troubleshooting.

Timing is everything with a webinar, so use your business sense to guide you in the when and where. Mondays and Fridays are not good, for Mondays are the days when most businesses have their own internal meetings, and Fridays are...well, it's TGIF, you know. You should not host a meeting right on the hour, but a little past, perhaps at quarter after. Most meetings end on the hour and this gives your participants time to pull out of one meeting and into yours. Hold the same webinar meeting or presentation at least twice; you'll be interacting with different people in different timezones many times and you want to make sure you make everyone feel like they were accommodated. The best time for a webinar is late morning or early afternoon. Always avoid hosting one during lunch hour, and to consider different people's schedules you should consider this to be from 11:30AM to 1:30PM.

Before and after every non-training webinar, conduct surveys. These enable you to constantly make your webinars better and more targeted, and they provide you with more qualified leads. Give the people what they are looking for and they'll come to you over and over, and send you referrals. Also, follow up every webinar with e-mails. For no-shows, send them an e-mail saying you hope to see them next time and invite them, and everyone else, to your next webinar.

Record all of your webinars. This assures that you don't forget things that were said, shown, and shared, and it enables you to go back and review your performance to help you do even better in the future, like pro footballs teams watching Sunday's game on film on Monday and Tuesday.

For more information on how to host a webinar with www.bestforwebinars.com/GoToWebinar and www.bestforwebinars.com/gotomeeting.htmGoToMeeting visit BestForWebinars.com