A webinar is easy to define: the term “webinar” itself is a portmanteau of “web” and “seminar”, denoting a seminar held online. If your business wants to hold meetings remotely, such as to save money and increase efficiency, those meetings could easily be delivered as webinars.

A Beginner’s Guide to Webinars and Delivering One for the First Time

Nonetheless, the “easily” part of that equation would naturally depend on how well-drilled you are with delivering a webinar.

If you have never actually delivered one before, there are a fair few recommended steps you could take to help minimize the potential for mistakes if or when you do dip your toes into the webinar waters.

How a Webinar Works: In a Nutshell

As you probably know from hosting seminars, the information shared in them isn’t simply sent in one direction, from the presenter to the audience. Similarly, a webinar is a highly interactive affair, where everyone can participate, live chat and even become a presenter, as TechFunnel notes.

Through an online webinar platform like that available from ON24, the speaker is capable of delivering a wide range of content – including PowerPoint presentations, webpages, and multimedia content – to attendees, wherever they happen to be physically based when watching the webinar.

This is one reason why webinars can effectively save money: people would not have to spend money on travel simply to attend the webinar.

As the meeting is taking place, it can also be recorded, allowing it to be made available later for people who did not originally see it live.

How Can You Effectively Prepare for Your First Webinar?

Firstly, you must choose the right subject as well as come up with a title that would tempt enough of the relevant people to sign up as would-be attendees.

You should also plan what you will say in your webinar, though this particular part of your preparation could be fraught with risk.

Search Engine Journal lists various formats you could consider for your webinar – with some of the most popular including single-presenter and dual-presenter formats.

Alternatively, you could arrange for a panel of experts to discuss the topic of the seminar.

As you put together the schedule, you should make sure it will not result in the webinar itself running for longer than an hour overall.

A webinar lengthier than this could too easily lose attention from its attendees and convince them that it has wasted their time.

Practice Delivering the Webinar Before Doing So Proper

Before you are due to present the webinar in its finalized form, you should do a ‘dry run’. This would have several advantages, including enabling you to detect any teething issues you might not have adequately accounted for and putting your mind at ease ahead of the webinar proper.

Conclusion

When do you practice the webinar, though, you should make sure that any speakers and guests lined up for the big event are there at the dress rehearsal, too. That way, you can verify that they all know what they have to do and are ready to perform for a much wider audience.

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