1 0 Archive | August, 2010
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What If I Screw Up A Live Webinar And How Do I Recover?

When you run a live webinar, it's only natural to think that you're going to eventually mess up something whether it's the way you kick off the webinar, delivering your webinar pitch or even your presentation – something is going to go wrong. Well, remember, you need to know what's going to happen, be ready for it and use that to make your next webinar even better.

If you think that your first webinar is going to run perfectly, you're wrong. If you think that your first 20 webinars are going to run without any problems, you're also wrong. Things are going to happen. Maybe your Internet connection will die or Go To Webinar will not display your screen correctly. Maybe your PowerPoint won't show up or you will lose your PowerPoint. You might be all ready to demonstrate a site for your viewers only to find out that the site is down for maintenance.

Instead of crossing your fingers, hoping nothing will ever go wrong, no, that things will go wrong. When these things do go wrong, what do you do? Always have some kind of a backup plan.

For example, if I was going to run a webinar showing how to accomplish something on EzineArticles and the site is down, I might instead whip up a PowerPoint or complete all the steps I was going to teach such as writing articles and leave out the component about submitting to EzineArticles. If I was going to interview a guest speaker and that speaker did not show up, I would do the best I could to explain the same materials without that speaker.

Whatever goes wrong on your webinar, keep in mind for next time what went wrong. If it was that your guest speaker did not show up then next time, have a better follow-up sequence to make sure they come to your webinar. If you messed up the technology, go back and rehearse for next time to make sure that your PowerPoint opens properly and that your webinar starts properly. If your problem was with your speaking presentation, rehearse the presentation to make sure you don't trip yourself up.

And that's how your cover for messing up on live webinars. Know it's going to happen, be ready for it and adjust later.

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31. Aug, 2010
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Four Things To Avoid When Running Live Webinars

Just because you can do something does not necessarily mean you should. Likewise, when you offer a video training session, streamed over the Internet, this is called a webinar and you have a live audience. You don't
want to make the same mistakes I see many other webinar marketers making. And that is unmuting attendees, running too long, waiting on the audience and lingering too long on one single subject.

You can unmute guests on a webinar. This is great if you have guest speakers or panelists but the average peron who is on a webinar either does not have the ability to speak in audio, they don't have a microphone.
Their microphone is setup wrong and there's feedback on the line. Or they just don't know anything. Just because someone comes to your presentation does not mean you should unmute them. Just like when you were
speaking from the stage, you're not gonna just randomly hand the microphone to someone in the audience. Because you don't
know what they will say or if they will have anything worthwhile to say.

Another mistake is running the webinar for too long a period of time. If you say your webinar is gonna be an hour and it ends up being 4 hours, you're gonna miss alot of people and you will have alot of
bored attendees at the very end. You should target your webinars to be around 60 to 90 minutes long. This is the length of a TV show or a movie. If you run longer than that, you really risk people getting
bored or just leaving. You also should not depend on the audience. Let's say, at the beginning of your webinar you ask everyone to type in the word "ready" to make sure there're all ready or you have them
all answering a survey. If no one is answering the survey and you just wait and wait for somebody to take action and no one is.

That looks bad on you, that's reverse social proof. It tells all your audience that no one else cares about what you have to say so why should they. If you are running a survey or asking people to complete some
kind of task and they aren't, simply move on. We've all been in that situation where your audience isn't that engaged and there's nothing you can do about it. You can either make the situation worse or adjust by moving on.

Finally, don't linger too long on one subject. It's way too easy, especially with a live audience to go off on a tangent or spend too much time answering one person's off topic question. If your're answering someone's
question, decide how much time you want to put into it. Five minutes, two minutes, maybe even one minute before going off to the next subject. Don't be afraid of saying "No, I won't answer that." Don't be
afraid of ignoring a question or even just saying that you don't know the answer or that it's not relevant. Avoid those four simple mistakes and your next webinar will be much more successful and run more smoothly
than your past webinars. Don't necessarily unmute everyone who comes along, keep the webinar on time, continue and move on if the audience reaction is not what you expect and stay on topic.

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31. Aug, 2010
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What If My Webinar Is Not Lasting Long Enough?

With a webinar, you can present live online training. And just like any presentation, you probably have a goal about how long you want your webinar to last. If you wanted your presentation to last an hour and you keep coming up short, you keep ending at the 20-minute or 30-minute mark, what are you doing wrong? And how can you get better so you hit your time goal? To make your webinar last longer, have more talk to about, take questions during the call and reiterate and demonstrate.

If you are stopping your webinar around the 20-minute mark, you probably just don't have enough to talk about or you're going through it too fast. Maybe you're not going into enough detail. Maybe you can still use the same outline but stop and explain things more or repeat important points to make sure people get them or recap things you've already spoken about. Different people go through their presentation slides at a different pace. I happen to go through my slides, one slide every 1 to 3 minutes but I know people who only go through one slide every 10 minutes. There is no real set number of slides to have in your PowerPoint for a 1-hour presentation. It depends on how quickly you go through the slides. If you have to add more slides to fill more time, do it. Because you're on a live webinar, you can take questions. Maybe you mentioned and somebody wants you to slow down or brings you off on a tangent. Somebody wants you to cover another topic. Or somebody wants you to recap a specific need you said a few minutes back.

Depending on your style, you might want to specify a point in your webinar to take questions. Or if you're like me, take questions as you're speaking. Don't worry because this is a webinar, you're attendees cannot interrupt your voice. They can only type in questions as text in a question box then you decide if you should ignore it or take care of it.

And finally, here's a way to make your webinar last longer without adding any new content and that's to reiterate and to demonstrate. Too many times, I see people and I hear people telling me things in a theoretical sense. They tell me how to set up an opt in page but they don't show me. You are on a webinar. You are showing you're screen. If you're telling people about something, show it to them. Let's say you were teaching a money management course and telling people how to always save more money than you spend. That sounds good in theory but I'd rather see your personal budget or for you to create a budget on the call with real life numbers so I could better understand it. Different people learn in different ways. Some people learn from the big picture, others learn from the example. Show both ways. This will make your webinar have a slower pace, which means the information will stick better with your attendees and it will make more sense.

If you're webinar is not lasting long enough, either add more content to talk about, take questions or demonstrate the things you taught, or a combination of the three. Run your very own webinar and become famous right here at www.webinarcrusher.com.

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30. Aug, 2010
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Make More Money From Your Webinars

I hope that you have run a webinar or at least been on a webinar or heard of one before. This is where you broadcast your screen and your
voice to an audience. But many people fall into the trap of wasting their time running webinars and not making money from them. How do you avoid this problem? Run a direct pitch
webinar, drop urls on the webinar recall, offer affiliate bonuses and use these presentation tools for a 30 (building email list building).

A direct pitch webinar is simple. Teach people something such as four mistakes to avoid or four tips about graphics. And at the end, give them an offer to buy a
training course from you about graphics. If they liked what they learned on the free call or if they got some kind of information out of that call. They will jump at the chance to get more of
that training.

If you are on someone else's webinar as a guest or you can't necessarily offer a hard pitch at the end, then mention some of your webinars or urls throughout the webinar. When you
introduce yourself, mention the url of your training course. When you give people the background about yourself and mention your credentials, one of them can be at the url to that
training course. You're not gonna get the same effect in this as a pitched webinar but some people will visit that url out of curosity and depending on how well that page converts
and how targeted this webinar audience is, you might get some sales.

With a webinar you can get more affiliate sales in a couple of ways. One way is to show people something and then direct them to the exact instructions on how to buy something through
your affiliate link. This means you might teach people something about graphics but, instead of offering your own course about graphics. Mention a link to someone else's graphics
course where you get the commission. You can take this one step further and get people to buy something from you. For example, a graphics course with you as the affiliate, and as a bonus,
offer a special training webinar.

And finally, just the fact that you're on a call, live, with your voice showing people something in real time. Automatically, makes you more authorative than any one else. What's more is
you can use this live presenatation to build the list. Annnounce the time and date you will give this free training but require people to sign up to your mailing list in order to get access.
And those are four ways you can make more money from your webinars. By running a direct pitch, url drop, affiliate bonus or authority and list building.

Increase the size of your list, get a bigger following, have more product and make more money with webinars. Find your training at www.webcrusher.com

** NOTE: () means I did not understand the word or sentence that was spoken
One in the first paragraph

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30. Aug, 2010
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What Time To Run Your Live Webinar?

Are you a superstitious marketer? By that, I mean do you try to second-guess yourself and worry about what time of day or what day of the week you're going to run your webinars.

I'm here to tell you that there's no right or wrong time and date to run webinars. I've run webinars on the weekends, early in the week, late in the week and the morning, afternoon, at night and I still get attendees. That's the most important thing to remember about webinars. Run them when it is convenient for you.

If you work a day job or you are busy with other commitments during the week, you have no choice but to run the webinars on the weekends. Every now and then, you might want to try running a webinar during the week just to see if there is a better turnout or if the crowd that comes to your webinar buys more stuff from you when you pitch at the end. The same goes for the time of day. If you usually run webinars in the morning, try running webinar in the evening just to see if anything's different.

But above all, don't be superstitious. It's way too easy to listen to one person's advice telling you that webinars only run on Thursday afternoons. But the problem with that logic is that if the perfect time to run a webinar was Thursday afternoons, wouldn't everybody run the webinars at that specific time? If that was the case, that time slot would be too crowded and it would no longer be the perfect time to run a webinar.

The other important reason to try different dates and times is to see what your subscribers like. Maybe more people on your particular list happen to show up on Tuesday mornings but maybe on my list, they happen to show up more on Thursday evenings. See what your list likes and combine that with the time slot that works best for you.

You are a business owner. You can set your own hours and that includes the time and date of webinar.

Once you figure out which time or the date you run your webinar and which day of the week, be consistent. If you find that you prefer and your subscribers prefer you to run webinars at Tuesdays at 4:30 PM, continue to run your webinars on Tuesdays at 4:30 PM just because that's what your list has gotten used to.

The perfect time to run your live webinar is the day of the week that's best for you and your list and the time of day that's best for you and your list. Nobody can tell you an exact day or time to run a webinar.

Now that you know when to run a webinar, let's figure out how to run one at www.webinarcrusher.com.

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30. Aug, 2010
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Why Should I Present My Webinar At The 640 x 480 Screen Resolution?

When you transmit your live online training or your webinar, it's important that your screen is viewable by many different audiences and that the recording of that live training is also viewable by as many people as possible. For that reason, I highly recommend for webinars you size your screen down to the lowest possible screen size which is 640 x 480 and record your webinar recording in full screen instead of recording a small area. Because you get a small file size, you see exactly what you are recording and it's easy to repurpose that video especially for embedding on a webpage.

When you record your video in a 640 x 480 screen size, your video recording is going to be very small at least in comparison to a much larger video. Think about this. If you recorded a video that's twice as wide and twice as high, you will have a video that's at least four times as large. You want to have these smaller file size so that people can download it faster and easier. It saves on your bandwidth and it processes on your computer much faster if you want to make edits.

The next big benefit to recording your video at a small screen size and recording in full screen is that you see exactly what the recording is going to look like. If you are recording just one single window for example only recording your web browser, it's not clear what the end result is going to look like. But if you record the entire screen then what you see what your live webinar participants see and what your viewers watching the recording see is all exactly the same. It's very simple for you and it's one less thing that can go wrong.

And finally, when you do have that recording, you have to keep in mind that most people will not be watching that video on a full screen. If you embed it on a webpage, you may have to size it down to about 600 pixels wide. If you're embedding it down to a blog post, you might size it down to 300 or 400 pixels wide. So, keep in mind that even if you record your screen at the lowest resolution possible, you're still going to have to size the recording down even more to make it fit on a regular webpage.

I don't know about you but I hate it when I see recordings done on a very large screen size and then size down because I can't see anything, all the text and writing is tiny. The mouse pointer is tiny. And the sized down recording is much different than the original presentation looked. And that's exactly why you should present at 640 x 480 screen resolution. It gives you a smaller file size in the recording. You record exactly what you see and broadcast and it's easy to resize down to show on a webpage.

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29. Aug, 2010
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How Do I Demonstrate On A Webinar?

When you run a webinar, you are showing your screen live and speaking to your audience live. That means that the most powerful thing you can show people is not necessarily a mind map or PowerPoint but a demonstration of you doing something whether that is placing a new real estate listing, creating an eBay auction, posting an outsourcing job, writing an article, setting up a blog. Whatever it is, the message you have to get across to people is many times more powerful if you show people instead of telling.

On your next webinar, consider using one of these three methods of demonstration. A screen shot PowerPoint, web browser, or point and click plus marker method.

The disadvantage to presenting something live on a call is that something might go wrong. Let's say you were showing people how to set up a blog. A million things might go wrong. You might accidentally show your password on the screen when creating that blog. Your web post might be down. You might come across an error you have not seen before.

If you're that nervous about something potentially going wrong on live webinar, take screen shots of the thing you are demonstrating. Take the screenshot of your entire screen. If you are showing people how to set the WordPress blog, take screenshots of your browser then take those screenshots, paste them into a PowerPoint presentation and stretch out the screenshot so it'll fill up your entire screen. That way, when you play the PowerPoint show, you are simply flipping through the screen shots of what you're doing. So, they can see what you were doing but you do not risk anything going wrong.

If you do want to demonstrate something live, just use your web browser. So few people realize they can show things other than PowerPoint on a live webinar. Show your browser in the screen and hit the F11 key to present it in full screen you show the most of the web page you're on. Now, demonstrate how to set up a WordPress blog, create an autoresponder list, post to a forum – anything you can do with a web browser, you can show on a webinar.

And finally when demonstrating, remember to explain every point and click and to use the marker tool to draw out the thing you're talking about. For example, when talking about a WordPress blog, you might mention things such as the steps you'll take.

Set up the WordPress blog, add a theme and add plug-ins. You might then open up the marker tool and write directly on your screen the words set up, theme and the word plug-ins. That way, people can get the big picture and see what you are about to do. If there is a specific link or text box that is important and demands attention, instead of talking about it take the marker and circle that thing people should look at.

And that's how you demonstrate on your next webinar using a screen shot PowerPoint, your web browser or the marker tool.

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28. Aug, 2010
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What Little Things Can Make A Big Impact On My Webinars?

When you are presenting live internet presentations or webinars, there are a few small tweaks you can make to your presentation to make it a whole lot better. I want to share those with you today.

The first thing that can have an enormous impact on you webinars is by saying nothing. That's right. You can add pauses into your presentation for dramatic effect. If you are finishing a thought, if you just said something profound, there's nothing wrong with stopping for one second and letting it sink in. It's your natural reaction to try to fill the silence. That's why people say words like "uhm," and "you know," and "like" to try to fill in the silence. But having a pause shows that you're in control of the conversation and that you are relaxed enough to be okay with little pauses.

Another big thing that can improve your webinars dramatically is to keep your hands off the mouse. Too many webinars especially ones that show the screen, show the mouse cursor dancing around, or the person manipulating the screen, selecting text randomly, moving the windows around, fidgeting. If you are watching a speaker in person fidget with their fingers or their clothes, you would be distracted from the content they were speaking. The same is true, if not more so, on a webinar because all the person is looking at is your screen. Keep your hand off the mouse unless you want to click on a link or advance the PowerPoint slides. If you can get a clicker or a wireless presentation remote, try that to advance your slides. That way you don't have to touch the mouse at all during your presentation.

Another thing that makes a big deal with webinars is to simply stop for questions. Too many presenters don't care at all about their audience and the audience has no idea if the presenter cares about them. If you feel like you just gave people a lot of information and you should stop and make sure they all understand it, stop and ask for questions, or stop and ask people if something makes sense, or stop and ask if they are ready to continue on.

If you have not been applying those three things to improve your webinars, add them. Add vocal pauses, keep your hand off your mouse, and stop for questions. Here is a method that is 50 times easier than any other way to generate content: It's at www.webinarcrusher.com.

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27. Aug, 2010
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How Many People Can I Expect On My Live Webinar Training Session?

When you run a webinar, you're going to have people register for it ahead of time then when you run your live training, they will attend it. But how many of those people who register will actually attend? Do you think that a 100% of people who register will attend? No. Do you think that half of people who register will attend? Not even close.

I have found that when I run a live webinar, the usual show up rate is 32% of those who register. That means if 100 people register for my webinar, 32 will show up. This percentage does not change too much from webinar to webinar for me. Your results might vary but you should plan on around 1/3 of the people who say their going to be at your live webinar to actually be there.

What can you expect people to do on your webinar and how long should you expect them to stay? This depends from person to person and the duration that people stay on my webinar is one factor that does change from webinar to webinar.

However, I have noticed that at the top of each hour, a small number of people leave. That means if I'm running a webinar at 4:30 in the afternoon, I'm going to get some people who leave at five o'clock, some people who leave at six o'clock, some people who leave at seven o'clock. Some people just have appointments or scheduled events at the end of the hour and you will lose a few people.

I've also noticed a slight drop off at the close of my webinar. If you're teaching something that then transition into a pitch, there are a small group of people who are never going to buy, who are not interested in buying, who will simply not stick around for your pitch. Even if you're not selling something, there are the impatient few who will leave as soon as it seems like your webinar is winding down. They feel like they got most of it and even if you have something very important at the end of your training, they will leave early.

That's the amount of people you can expect to show up to your webinar, about 1/3. But on top of this, keep in mind that some people will leave at the top of the hour and some people will leave at the close of your webinar.

I want to help you with all the technical details, your own personal roadblocks and get all your marketing solved when it comes to live webinars at www.webinarcrusher.com.

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27. Aug, 2010
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How Do I Handle Questions And Hecklers On A Webinar?

When you run your live webinar training session, you're going to have many different personalities in your audience. Some will be nice and some will be mean. That's just the way the world works. When one of these people is loud or rude or ask too many questions or ask questions that trip you up, what do you do? Your choices are to ignore, laugh or recover.

Many people who I see running webinars stop dead in their tracks when a single question they don't know how to answer comes up or they will stop everything their doing to read just one question or even worse, they will read a question out loud without reading it to themselves first. If this sounds like you then for your first several webinars, you should either ignore all questions or have a set time for questions. That way, you are not distracted by people asking them.

After you run several more webinars and you are at the point where you can read questions as they come in, keep in mind that you don't have to answer every single question especially if it's not relevant or if you're running short on time. If somebody mentions something or asks something that is relevant and is a valid point for example, if they don't believe the claims you are making or if you left a very important flaw out in the open when you're explaining a step-by-step procedure.

For example, let's pretend you were giving a webinar about how to set up an autoresponder with AWeber. Somebody might ask, "Isn't such and such autoresponder service even better than AWeber?" And you might have to address this question in a way that makes fun of the question or at least explains why it's not relevant. My answer to that kind of question would be that there might be other services that have better features than the one I am demonstrating but this is what I chose to demonstrate and this is the service that's the most newbie friendly. Some people might say things you don't like and you might just have to laugh it off. Somebody might tell me on a webinar that I talk too fast or slur my words or explain things too fast and I'll just admit that's what I do.

The final thing you can do when someone asks a rude question or makes a rude statement on a webinar is to simply recover. Admit that there is a problem and move on. You might be demonstrating how to set up an autoresponder and one screen that you're using might not be working. Explain to your audience that they might too come across this problem and here's what you would do to solve it. The things you teach and demonstrate are a lot more helpful and a lot more real when things go wrong and you recover instead of trying to cover it up.

And that's how you handle questions and hecklers on a webinar. Decide if you're going to ignore the question, laugh about it or recover and move on.

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26. Aug, 2010
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