Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you this fine day?
Me?
I am having a great time exploring in more depth the world of webinars.
If you’ve been following our channel, you’ll know that I’ve been looking more and more
seriously at the world of webinars so it’s something a little bit different today.
I’m going to ask you a big favor as well as deliver some awesome content.
We’re going to cover what I consider to the 7 steps to creating great webinars but
I have a special ask of you, which I will do in just a few seconds.
All right, here is a deal.
I am about to dive into what I consider to be the 7 keys to creating great webinars.
Frankly, there are probably 700 keys to creating great webinars, depending on what’s important
to your particular audience but I’m going to look at 7 general keys.
Before I do, I’ve got a huge favor to ask.
I am in the middle of developing a brand new webinar course and one of the things that
I need to find more good examples of are people creating great, compelling webinars.
So if you have been to a great webinar, if there’s one person who has delivered a webinar
who you think nailed it and it absolutely resonated with you, will you let me know?
Will you comment in the box below and let me know what webinar really worked for you
or who’s delivering webinars that are making a difference with you?
They could be educational.
They can be sales.
They can be training.
They can be on any topic because there’s such a broad spectrum of topics around the
whole webinar scenario book.
Please comment below.
Let me know.
I’m going to follow up and look at what’s common amongst all those people creating great
webinars and I will be featuring some of them in bonus material around the upcoming courses.
You can do me a huge solid if you would be so kind as to let me know who is kicking what,
webinar-wise.
Now as far I’m concerned, what are the 7 keys to creating great webinars?
The very first key is message, making sure you know what your message is.
This actually ends up encompassing a whole bunch of things.
If you understand what it is you’re going to try and deliver, what core value you’re
going to try and deliver in a webinar, it means that A) you know who your audience and
you also understand the importance of niche, of focusing on a small set of information.
One of the challenges of webinars is we try and over-deliver.
We try and give too much.
If we look at typical webinars being maybe an hour in length, with all of the administrative
stuff that we have to do, top and tail, with a webinar, allowing for questions, etc., you
probably have maybe 40 minutes of real content that you can deliver.
Now 40 minutes sounds like a lot but it really isn’t all that much time, especially when
you want to tell people something and then reinforce that information and frame it with
some good context.
So making sure that you know what the core few things, maybe four or five points that
you want people to learn, or maybe seven like I’m doing right now, the core things that
you want to teach your audience are, that means you know your audience, you understand
your content and you maintain that sort of focus.
The next thing is preparation, making sure that everything is set up for you properly
and for your audience.
Now preparation goes way before the delivery of the webinar.
The first thing around preparation is knowing your webinar software and having a good registration
system, a good way to share information with people and making it easy for them to register
and sign up.
At the end of the day, you have to make the whole process very easy for your audience,
very non-invasive for your audience so having a good technical setup and good registration
system, a good follow-up system and of course really good, robust software that you use
to deliver the webinar is absolutely paramount.
Then you have to consider your format.
It’s the third key.
Now the format takes a whole bunch of different criteria into play.
What type of webinar is it?
Is it a sales webinar?
Do you have to have some sort of call to action at the end?
Is it educational where you might want to actually be testing people on what they’re
learning?
Is it informational where it’s mainly just the delivery of content but you have to make
sure you give them access to follow-up information a little bit later?
And what is your actual metaphor for delivery going to be?
Is it going to be a talking head?
Are you going to have a lot of video?
Is it going to be mainly a slideshow?
Are you going to do a hybrid webinar where you have live action plus prerecorded and
pre-taped action?
You have to consider all of that plus you have to consider what I consider to be the
most important aspect for success for a webinar – what sort of interaction are you going
to have?
One of the beauties of webinars is the fact that we can create an interactive event, a
dialogue.
The fact that people are at home when they’re watching it actually means they could have
higher levels of interaction than if you were to deliver the same content say in a seminar
format because with the chat forms that we can have, side barring, or the ability to
actually bring people in and ask questions and interact with you during the webinar,
that creates an entirely unique layer of interaction which if you really want to dive deep into
the webinar pool and find exactly what it will do for you, you have to figure out how
to manage that level of interaction.
So when we speak about format, not only do we have to think about how we’re going to
draw people in through poll questions, through chat, etc., but we also have to figure out
how we’re going to manage that from a presenter’s point of view because the person presenting
the content has to concentrate on the delivery of great content.
They can’t be spending a lot of time interacting with the audience and watching the chat roll,
for example.
Mixed in with the questions, comments and encouragement are technical problems and questions
that are completely non sequitur.
You can’t have them breaking their attention while they’re trying to read their way through
all that content.
So for my webinars, I like to have somebody hosting the webinar who produces it, who manages
it like a live call and radio show producer might do, screening the calls, forwarding
the important questions to the host, etc.
That all falls under having a proper format and understanding the overall picture of what
your webinar is supposed to look like as you deliver it.
The next key is focus.
Everything that I’ve said up to now really relates back to focus, doesn’t it, making
sure you know your audience, making sure you know your content, removing distractions from
the host or from the presenter, making sure that they can focus on delivery of great content.
Making sure that you’ve got focus, always your eye on the prize of what the webinar
is about is essential to delivering good webinar content.
Hand in hand with focus comes respect for not only yourself but your content and your
audience.
You have to respect all of the different participants in this webinar.
You respect yourself by doing the best possible job.
You respect your content by preparing and rehearsing and making sure it’s delivered
in the best possible light.
You also respect your audience by doing that.
You also respect your audience by delivering exactly what you promised.
One of the things that bothers me most about a lot of the different sales webinars that
I go into is people say they’re going to teach you something but they spend the entire
webinar time selling you something that theoretically will teach you, I guess, downstream.
But the bottom line, if you say you’re going to teach people how to do things, teach them
that.
Deliver what you say you’re going to.
It shows respect for yourself, your content and your audience.
This next one is a difficult thing to insist upon but you’ve got to bring your own personality
to the webinar.
Now if people are going to spend an hour listening to you, they don’t want to just listen to
a canned speech.
They want your personality so if you’re funny, if you’re whimsical, if you’re
droll, bring that into the webinar, especially if you’re creating a family of webinar products.
If you’re going to be consistently delivering a series of webinars, be consistent in how
you present yourself.
I think the best way to do that is to be yourself.
People often ask me or when they meet me, they often comment that I’m just like I
am on my channel.
I think I am just like I am in my channel or on my webinars, except when I’m recording
I’m slightly amped up version.
I have a little more voltage going through me when I’m delivering this sort of content.
But that’s very easy for me to do because I’m an extrovert.
You have to find that inner extrovert in you and make sure that you’re celebrating your
personality and letting it flow through.
That allows people to engage with you.
It makes the content that much more valuable.
I think you have to run the risk of pushing a few people away, of having some people say
“I don’t like that style” and having them leave in order to really reach the people
with your personality.
That’s a risk that we all have to take but is well worth taking.
There’s plenty of people delivering great content.
Be unique.
Be yourself.
Allow people to engage with you and then your content will resonate that much more.
The final step to creating a great webinar as far I’m concerned is the follow-up, making
sure that you follow up with what you’ve promised, whether that’s an email of the
recording, whether it’s a list of materials.
Of course if you’re in a sales cycle, you’re going to be following up with sales letters
but make sure that you’re following up with the content that you promised to deliver as
well.
Those to me are keys to a great webinar.
Let’s see if I can go through it all.
Message, focusing on your message and understanding your niche.
Included in that is knowing your audience.
Then preparation, making sure that all of your tools, your technology, everything is
ready in advance, that your audience has an easy way to register for your webinar and
that your delivery system is robust and ready to go.
Figure out what format you want to deliver, making sure you have a team to help you deliver
that format.
Focus in on your contact, focusing on your end game.
Respect your content, yourself and your audience.
Allow your personality to shine through and finally following up.
Those are my keys to a successful webinar but they might not be the only keys.
I know they’re not the only keys to a successful webinar so I hope that you folks who have
stuck with me this long will let me know which webinars resonate for you do I can interview
those people, look at what they’re doing and I can learn more keys to successful webinars
so that I can share that with you as well.
That’s it.
Now there are three ways to stay in touch with us here on DottoTech.
The first of course is subscribe to this channel.
Second, this is very important, especially today.
Subscribe to our newsletter because then you’ll get notice of upcoming webinars that I’ll
be delivering, many of which will be about webinars in the coming months.
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That’s it for today.
Till next time, I’m Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!