How to Get Your First Webinar Up and Running

If you’ve been thinking about kick-starting your online webinar for promoting your courses or live online classes but still haven’t because of a lot of doubts and questions, this article can help you shake off the rust and get started.

I’m going to walk you through all that you need to know and prepare before thinking of running the webinar. If you can check this below list one by one, you’ll eventually be equipped to get your webinar up and running.

Let’s get started with a list of things to start focusing on.

1. Webinar Title
2. Content
3. Slides
4. Fixing a Date and Time
5. Going Online
6. Marketing
7. Hardware

Let’s look into each of the above in detail

Webinar Title

You must be a bit surprised that webinar title is listed exclusively as a list of things to start while it comes across as a matter-of-fact thing. But trust me, webinar title can make or break your webinar. Hence there is a widely followed method to arrive at the webinar title by most people. What you need to do to come up with a webinar title is not to start with a webinar title. You need to start with the problem you’re setting out to solve with your webinar. Let’s look at the step by step method to arrive at an attention catching webinar title

• Identify the problem you’re going to solve
• Find out others who solve the same problem
• Take note of the feedback given by their audience
• Jot down the keywords from the above steps
• Go for your title using these keywords
• Fine tune the same to make it irresistible and easy to sound

Content

This is your game to play. Content is what has got you so far. That said, just having the content is not enough. Let’s look into best practices you can follow while putting it all together for your audience

• Start with learning outcome
• Identify and explain the struggle without your content
• Show them how life can change after consuming your content
• Structure your content into byte sized lessons
• Allocate time for each unit and DO NOT overshoot it

Slides

The first thing to pop up in your head might be the designs and the colours of the slides. That’s an important thing as well. But what we’re going to look here is a bit beyond that. We’re going to look into what are the types of slides a typical webinar would need.

• The Title Slide
• Table of Contents
• About Slide
• The “Instructional” Slides
• Testimonial Slides
• The Offer Slide
• Q&A Slide
• Thank You Slide

Hack Link!

Here’s help from me to get your free slide template to get started instantly!

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1tQ9ZMr_cDf_Km_FjwA2OBYCxhNViAihpS8-Y261YmbY/edit

Fixing a date & time

Yes! “When” you schedule your webinar plays a big role in the number of registrations. Here’s a detailed statistical report on Date and Time for Webinars by GoToWebinar Save your Webinar for Wednesday and Thursday. Both these days have an average attendee count higher than the rest.More people register on Tuesday than any other day of the week. Together Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday attract more than 63% of all registrations. 36% of registrations happen between 8 AM and 10 AM. The hour of 10AM accounted for 29% of all attendees closely followed by 11AM with 24%.

Going Online

All that we saw so far was about the product/offering alone. How are we going to spread the word? We need a whole set of online pages and tools for getting your webinar out there. Let’s dive right in!

• The Landing Page
• Thankyou Page
• Email Automation
• Webinar Platform
  Let’s look into each of the above in a bit more detail

‍

Landing Page :

Now, this is the most important thing when it comes to getting people to register for your webinar. This page will make or break the registrations. Having said that, let’s see what is a landing page. A landing page is where people sign up or register for your webinar. Its primary job is to make the registrations hassle-free. This is also a page which is designed to be attractive and filled with psychological triggers that help induce the mindset to take immediate action.

I think you’ve realized the significance of the landing page. Let’s get into the details of the landing page by looking into what makes a landing page close to perfect.

• It needs to clearly communicate the Value on offer
• A video-message
• A unique value-proposition
• Mobile responsive
• Demand Factor

‍

Thank you Page :

This page comes once the lead/person has completed the registration on the landing page. The Thankyou page is here for a purpose a little higher than just saying thank you. It can be used to induce another action from the registrant. The registration/sign up is great, no doubt. But you never forget that the ultimate win is the registrant attending your webinar. There’s a lot that could come in the way of the registrant making it to your webinar. One of them is memory. You don’t want your registrant to “forget” about your webinar. Here’s where you can integrate Google calendar to encourage the registrant to add it to their schedule hence reducing the chances of the registrant’s absence.

E-Mail - Automation :

There’s so much one needs to get in place to get quality leads. It’s just a matter of paying attention to detail and obsessing over every step. Another step in this game of attracting quality leads is Email Automation. It doesn’t end at the Thank you page. It doesn’t end at getting your registrants to add your webinar to their schedule. The next step you want to add your quality lead generation process is to keep your people in sight of the webinar until the day of the webinar. There’s time between the day of registration and the day of attending the webinar. Time can turn things cold. This email automation will help you to keep your registrants warm. Before your registrants get distracted with their life, you got to keep visiting them through the emails at well timed intervals. Or simply put, you need to keep the reminders going. The email automation doesn’t end at reminders. Reminders are just the beginning of email automation. You’re feeling all sorted? You think you’ve got all your bases covered? Well, not yet. Even after all this, you’re going to get a number of no shows. It’s what it is. You will continue to pursue the absentees to attend your webinar the next time you conduct it. About the ones that attended, you’d pursue to take them to the next step in your business plan. You’ll need another automation to reach the absentees. At this point you’d be running two parallel automations. One for the new leads for the next webinar. Another is to get the absentees to attend your next. There is another one apart from the above mentioned, which is “Nurturing Campaigns” which is the crucial one for getting sales. We’ll look into this in the next article where I will cover strategies to get sales from the webinar attendees.

‍

Webinar Platform :

We arrive at the crux of this entire article. The webinar platform. All said and done, you need the webinar platform to conduct the much-planned event. You need to make sure to choose the one that’d fit just right for webinars that are meant for promotions. Before hit Google and sign up with one of the webinars platforms out there, make sure the one you choose has the below list

1. Automatic cloud-based webinar events and recordings
2. Great waiting room experience
3. Chats
4. Polls
5. Handouts
6. Built-in Analytics
7. Integration friendly
8. Autoresponders
9. Compatibility with all browsers

Here’s what your webinar infra should like in a nut-shell.

• Participants shouldn’t be able to mute/unmute themselves, only the hosts should be able to mute/unmute participants’ audio which helps you have complete control of the webinar
• Video sharing must be possible only by hosts
• You infra need to able to handle up-to 10000 participants
• Participants list must be visible only to the host
• Payment Integration Equipped
• Reminder Emails Enabled

Pro Tip

You can also go live on YouTube by just using a VC tool. Refer restream.io for more details.

Marketing

Alright, you think everything is done and dusted? You’re partly right. You’ve done all this keeping in mind the people that are going to show up for your webinar right?! For that, you need to drive traffic to the webinar registration page, let people know you’re running a webinar on a particular date and time. Yes, you got to promote your webinar! Let’s check out the different ways in which you can drive traffic to your webinar registration page.

There are two ways to drive traffic to the registration page, through free strategies and paid strategies. Let’s look into each of them

Free Traffic Strategies :

1. Email List : One of the most popular methods out there. This is one of the great ways to let your existing leads know about the webinar you’re conducting. I’ve written a post dedicated to building an email list. Here it is.
2. Strategic Partnerships : This is about partnering with experts offering complementary products. For example, if your course is about helping people write resumes, you can tie up with recruiters who can promote your webinar in their circle.
3. Affiliates : This is another super hit strategy if you can forge a relationship with the industry influencers. There are influencers in all the domains. You need to find the one for yours and crack a deal to get the influencer to promote your offering to their following in exchange for a part of your revenue.
4. Social Media : Last but not the least, your own social pages. No matter what, you gotta keep your pages growing until a point your own page contributes your revenues as much as each of the above strategies. This may not be an immediate win, but you have to start somewhere.

Paid Traffic Strategies :

I’ve listed three most popular paid advertising on the internet. Though each has their unique modes of operation, the common thread among them all is that you can customise your target criteria in terms of location, interests, age and much more.

1. Google AdWords : One key differentiator here is that you’ll get leads with intent to pursue your offering.
2. Facebook Ads : Compared to Google Adwords, Facebook works differently. Facebook shows the ads to the people whom it counts as the ones with similar interest as your offering.
3. YouTube Ads : Here your collateral is a video promo of your webinar which would play on relevant videos on YouTube whose viewers may be your potential registrants.

Hardware

To start with, all you need is a Computer with camera, speakers, lighting and mic (not mobile) and Internet Connection.

Pro Tip:

Given the hard work that has gone into the above, you can run automated webinars by reusing the previous webinar recording.

I hope this article helps you to get your webinar up and running. If you do need assistance, feel free to fill this form and I will get in touch with you through the phone.