Gabrielle Jeans’s Weblog

Webinars are fast becoming one of the most cost effective, powerful ways of promoting your business and developing relationships with prospects.  You can tap into a far wider audience geographically speaking by having webinars than by having in-person seminars.  Webinars are also a great way of building your prospect email database.  Here are some ways you can boost the effectiveness of your webinars.

I’ll explain what a webinar is for those unfamiliar with them.  A webinar is a web-based seminar (hence web-inar instead of sem-inar).  Essentially, you use the internet as the medium for presenting a seminar.  Webinars can be used to present information in a variety of ways for many purposes.  You can present via audio whereby your attendees listen to your voice as you guide them through a presentation.  The only difference with this type of webinar from normal in-person seminars is people can’t see you as they would if you were teaching them in a traditional classroom.  However, you can have a live video feed of yourself while you talk to your attendees if you choose.

You totally control what your attendees see during the webinar.  You can have them view a presentation slideshow which you control just like at an in-person seminar.  You can show them a particular application or file on your PC.  You can bring up a web browser and show them any web sites you want.  You can even give temporary control of the webinar to any of your attendees.

Ask The Right Questions During Registration

Use the webinar registration process as a way of learning about your prospects.  It’s very important you walk the fine line between asking enough questions to have a basic understanding of your prospects and not asking too many questions.  If you ask too many questions and make the registration process invasive, chances are many won’t register for the webinar at all.  So have a maximum of 5 mandatory questions on the registration form for your attendees.  You can have more questions on the form, but make them optional.

Don’t ask for information you don’t need.  You really don’t need their name, and you definitely don’t want to make providing their phone number mandatory.  The only thing you really need to get is their email address.  So make sure you are using a double opt-in process with your webinar registration.  That means once the person finishes registering, a confirmation email is sent to the email address they provide, confirming that it was in fact them who registered for the webinar.  The double opt-in process prevents people from giving phony email addresses just so they can get the login information for the webinar.