There is a growing trend in the blogging space, and that’s the movement towards webinars. The best way to describe a webinar is to think of a conference, but everyone is online and can watch the person’s computer screen that is holding the event. Everyone calls in to listen and the person running the webinar can take questions and give seminars all online, usually free to the people attending.
So why are people using webinars, and how is it making them money?
Most guru’s, entrepreneurs and bloggers are using webinars as a teaching method. Just like you are reading this post on the blog, we could easily setup a webinar and have everyone call in and I could give you visuals and walk you through the whole process. Most of the time webinars are used as a selling tool. The person running the webinar will walk you through all of the steps of how to do something, then follow up with a consulting or product sale at the end.
How to Get Started with Your Own Webinar
There are many solutions out there for running your own webinar, but from a blogging stand point, let’s use ClickMeeting.com, which has a much lower price point than other competitors like GoToMeeting. Depending on the size of the audience you would be including in your webinar, the packages and price plans will vary.
When running a webinar, there is no complicated software of tools you really need to learn. Everything is hosted from ClickMeeting and you just need to change all the settings and arrange a time and meeting for everyone to attend. At the time of your webinar, everyone will call in to your event and will be able to view your computer screen or whatever you would like them to see. This is the same as watching a video online, except it is live and there is interaction between the users.
Better yet, you can watch this quick two minute video on the impact of webinars for online business and interacting with blog readers.
Setup a Free Trial Webinar
You can sign up for a free trial account and get started in less than 30 seconds. Remember, there is no installation required and each webinar is 100% rebrandable (so it looks and feels like your web site or business). Why not start a webinar for your blog or web site and see what it leads to?
@ Zac This is an Awesome piece of information and i want to know is there any demo or free version available? I want to check before i buy it. The video is good to understand, super post and idea to interact with the audiences that come to the blog.
@Michel Blaze, the big providers such as GoToWebinar and Webex (and Clickmeeting) provide free 30 day trials of their software. You should be able to trial a few and see what is the best fit for you. Adobe even has a webinar hosting product.
The best free software we’ve tried was DimDim – unfortunately it was bought out earlier this year and is no longer in existence as a free platform.
If you don’t mind advertising around your presentation, you could try AnyMeeting. The big drawback for a sales presentation with this though is that you could potentially have competitors products being advertised while your presentation is running.
As Zac suggests, the most powerful feature of live webinar software is the ability to interact with your audience during the presentation. You can run “polls” (basically – set up questions that people answer during the presentation and get instant results to feed back to them) and you can also take questions from people (they connect either over the phone or through their headset or computer microphone.)
It’s very important, if you’re attempting to run a sales presentation, that you stick to a formula. This entails building rapport in your introduction, delivering 2 or 3 pieces of good quality content, and then smoothly transitioning into your offer.
Your offer should be time based – my favourite thing is to offer some really good bonuses if people buy in the next hour, because you can send them to your standard sales page and send the bonuses either by post if it is a tangible item, or by email if it’s electronic.