Syed Balkhi — October 2, 2019 Webinars are a great way to demonstrate your expertise or promote your products to your audience. They also help your audience connect with you and they can boost engagement too.
But creating your first webinar can be scary. What if you mess it up? What if nobody attends? These are valid concerns if you’ve never hosted a webinar before. But, don’t worry. With just a few tips, you can hold a webinar that your audience will love.
Here’s how to hold your first successful webinar.
Choose a specific topic.
The first step to holding a successful webinar is choosing a webinar topic that’s interesting to your target audience. After all, if no one is interested in the topic you choose, no one will attend the webinar. So, how do you choose a topic that your audience will love?
One way is to turn your most popular blog content into a webinar. You can take a look at your Google Analytics metrics to discover the most popular posts and pages on your website. For instance, if your most popular blog post is a guide to email marketing, your audience would likely be excited to sign up for a webinar on that topic.
But, since email marketing is such a broad topic, narrow it down to something like “Email List Segmentation Strategies”. Choosing a specific topic will let you go into more detail in your webinar and help you to be more focused too.
Use the right tools.
After you’ve chosen a great webinar topic and created your content, it’s now time to find the right tools to hold your webinar. The most important tool of course, is the webinar platform you choose.
There are a number of different webinar platforms on the market. For your first webinar though, it’s wise to choose a free webinar platform.
Then, as your webinars become larger and more successful, you can move on to a paid plan or paid platform that allows for more attendees and offers more powerful features.
Other tools you should have for your webinar include:
- Camera – Your camera doesn’t have to be fancy, it could be the built-in camera on your computer or your phone.
- Microphone – Poor audio quality can ruin an otherwise great webinar, so invest in a microphone
- Slide Deck Maker – Make your webinar visually appealing with a slide deck. You can create a slide deck with PowerPoint, Google Slides, or Prezi.
Run a test webinar.
Now, before jumping in and hosting your webinar, take some time to practice by running a test webinar. You’re bound to fumble over your words a bit during your first webinar, you don’t have to be perfect. But, by running a test webinar you can avoid making any big mistakes during the live event.
So, make sure all of your equipment is working and that you’re familiar with the webinar platform you’re using. You can also invite a friend to watch you run through your webinar. Your friend or colleague can let you know if everything sounds and looks great during your practice run.
Promote your webinar.
To create a lot of buzz about your webinar and get a lot of attendees, you need to promote your webinar. Start by creating a dedicated landing page for your webinar. A landing page will help you get more signups for your webinar because there’s nothing else on the page to distract users. In fact, according to TechJury, long landing pages can generate up to 220% more leads than above the fold call-to-action (CTA).
Your webinar landing page should include a signup form for the online event as well as a description of the event including what users will learn and why they should sign up.
Take a look at this webinar landing page from Kissmetrics as an example.
You can also promote your webinar using these promotion strategies:
- Send an email to your subscribers
- Post about it on social media platforms
- Create a blog post to announce it
The more excitement you can create around your webinar, the more attendees you’ll have.
Follow up with attendees.
So, you’ve now completed your first successful webinar, congratulations! But did you think your job was over? If you want to continue to improve your webinar skills, you need to get feedback on how your first webinar went.
Follow up with your webinar attendees by sending them an email thanking them for attending and at the same time, ask them what they thought of your first webinar. With the feedback you receive, you can create an even better webinar next time.
Also, consider reaching out to a few of your webinar attendees for a testimonial. For your next webinar you can use those testimonials as social proof to get even more registrations.
Over to you.
With these tips for how to hold your first successful webinar, your audience will think you’re a pro. And when your first webinar goes so smoothly, you can be sure that your audience will sign up for your next one in an instant.
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