You always want as many people as possible on a webinar.  How are you going to do it?  With traffic.  And the easiest and best form of traffic is a joint venture.  You get somebody else with a large following to promote the webinar for you.  How are you going to convince them?  Explain what’s in it for them, whether it’s an affiliate commission or a mutual promotion.

It would be nice to think that everyone on the internet is just waiting for you to come along so they can give you extra exposure.  But that’s simply not true.  People need to have a good reason to recommend you to other people.  Maybe they are trying to get a favor from you or trying to build a relationship with you or just give their subscribers something of value.  When you approach someone to promote for you, don’t just ask them to do it.  Explain it in terms of what they will get out of this promotion.

One of my favorite things to promise and the easiest for you is to offer an affiliate commission.  If you present something to their list and you end with an offer, make sure that offer gives the promoter credit for at least 50% of the sale.  That means if you’re presenting something about time management and you’re selling at the end a video course for $100, make sure that for each one of those sales, the promoter gets at least $50 out of that.  If you don’t make a lot of sales, then don’t try to get invited back; but if you do make a lot of sales, it’s a good relationship.

If you don’t have something to sell or you don’t think you’ll be able to sell very well on a webinar, you might have to go the mutual promotion approach.  This is exactly what it sounds like.  They promote you and at a later date, you promote them.  This might mean that if they have a webinar in the future, you’ll promote that webinar.  If they have a new blog post or they have something new to sell in the future, you will promote that.  They do you a favor and you do them a favor.  You might have to do the favor first because you are the one doing the asking and you might not get anything in return.  That’s fine.  That’s life.  All that means is that the other person is unreliable and you should not contact that person in the future to promote you webinar.

When getting others to promote your webinar, keep in mind what’s in it for them.  Are you going to offer an affiliate commission or run a mutual promotion?  Get all the steps you need from creating a course, running a webinar, and getting people on it at www.webinarcrusher.com.

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One feature that is commonly overlooked with webinars is the ability to have a co-host or a panelist on a webinar.  In fact, you can have many panelists on a webinar.  You can unmute people.  You can pass the screen to people.  You can give others the ability to see questions and start surveys; and the best part about this is when these different panelists are speaking, the webinar software will say, “Now speaking…” and the name of the person, so it’s easy to identify who is saying what.  That begs the question, “Should you get panelists on your webinar?” and “Are they required?”

They are helpful but they are not required.  You need to be able to stand on your own.  You need to be able to get a partner needing you more than you need them and you should be careful about who you unmute on a live call.  With anything but especially with webinars, you’re going to have a lot more power if you first master running webinar by yourself.  This way, you’re not dependent on anyone else’s webinar account or on anyone to introduce you.  You can run the show.  I have put on many webinars where I presented with a partner and one of our computers broke; either we lost our internet connection, the computer crashed, or the webinar software crashed, and I needed the other person to fill in for me or vice versa.

It’s a lot better to have two people who could stand on their own than two people who are dependent on each other to run a webinar.  This will also make it easy to get a partner on a webinar if you really want one.  If things with you and your webinar partner are not working out, it should be easy for you to find a new webinar partner.  If your business partner refuses to do webinars, you can present this offer, “I am going to run this webinar with or without you.  I’d rather it’s with you but if I have to, I will run it all by myself.”  Then, your business partner will want to be on the webinar just to not be left out.

When we’re talking about panelists, your panelists don’t have to be needed the entire time.  I put on calls where the panelists introduced me to his subscribers and didn’t really have much to say until the end.  On the other hand, I’ve also been on calls where we ran an interview and the panelists had all the questions to ask me and I simply answered them.  But be careful who you unmute on a webinar.  It seems like common sense but there are a lot of weirdoes on the internet, a lot of people who just love to cause a riot in a webinar.  Even if someone has good intentions, far too often, when I have unmuted someone, they didn’t have their microphone ready or I heard an echo in the backgrounds.  So you definitely should not unmute anyone on the webinar who you choose and you shouldn’t count on that person to have the proper audio hardware to even speak to you.  If you do unmute someone, make sure it’s someone you trust and someone who either has a headset or has dialed in on the phone for their audio.

Panelists on a webinar are great but you don’t always need them.  You should be able to stand on your own, you should be able to tell on a webinar that you don’t need them to run the webinar and you don’t want to unmute every single person on a call.

Figure out exactly how to run your own webinar, with a partner or without, at www.webinarcrusher.com.

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I understand that if you’re looking into running your own webinar or web seminar, you’re going to have a million questions buzzing around in your head about how to do it and what to do right and what not to do wrong.  One of these things is how long should the webinar last.  I recommend your webinars go for approximately one to one and a half hours.  You don’t want to present for less than 30 minutes and you don’t want to present for longer than three hours simply because you want to end with a bang and not a whimper.

An hour is a good length of time.  An hour is about the length of time as a TV show.  Half an hour is not really long enough to present everything you want to present to people and when you get past an hour and a half, you get a lot of people dropping off, especially at the top of the next hour when people have plans.  An hour also makes it easy for you to figure out how much long you need to talk.  For example, if you start presenting your webinar at 10 o’clock in the morning and it’s over at 11 o’clock in the morning and you look at the clock on your wall and you’re at about 10:45, you know it’s about time to start wrapping up.

Why is it bad to present for too short or too long a time?  Many reasons.  First of all, people can show up late to the webinar and if your webinar is only 10 minutes long, they’ve missed the entire thing.  With a short webinar, you also don’t really have time to get into questions or to demonstrate anything or really to show anything of value.  All you can do is show some quick theory and you’re done.  Also consider the fact that many people took time out of their day to come to your webinar.  It’s kind of a waste if people set aside half an hour or an hour and it turns out your webinar is over in 10 minutes.

You also don’t want to run too long.  Most movies don’t run longer than three hours.  So, yours shouldn’t as well because people are going to leave, come back, and miss information or just get bored and leave.  It’s a lot easier to keep your audiences’ attention while your energy level is high during that first hour instead of grasping for straws at hour number three.  You also don’t want to last for too long because your webinar will end in a whimper instead of a bang.  You want to end your webinar at a high note.  You want to end your webinar where your attendees feel like they got something and now are going to move on to the next step which is why an hour is about the right time for your webinar—not 30 minutes, not three hours—one hour.

Now that you know how long your webinar is going to last, let’s get you set up at www.webinarcrusher.com.

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A webinar which is a web seminar or a live video online learning session allows you to broadcast your screen and your voice to an audience live in realtime.  But how do they hear your voice?  How are you going to broadcast your voice to this group and how are they going to pick it up on the other end?

You can use the Voice Over IP option, call on the phone, or have both.  GoToWebinar by default will try to use the microphone on your computer to hear your voice.  I personally use a Logitech USB headset for my webinar broadcasting and the audio is very decent.  This uses what’s called the Voice Over IP which sounds fancy but all it means is you are recording your voice with the microphone in your computer and it’s broadcasting that sound over the internet along with the picture of your screen.  If you have a microphone for your computer, I definitely recommend using this option.

On the other hand, if you don’t have a headset or for some reason you just can’t get the microphone to work, there is another option.  In your audio settings, you can switch from the computer mic and speakers to a telephone.  They will give you a special phone number to dial, usually a local one in your area, then a special access code and then you can use your telephone to talk to your audience.  The other end of the phone line will be at the webinar service provider and they will just take that audio to send to everyone else.  In addition, if you have other panelists speaking on the line, you can hear their responses over the phone as well.

We’ve talked about how you will send your voice into your webinar, but how will people hear it?  They have the same options as you.  They can choose to hear your voice again whether this is over the computer or phone.  They can choose to hear your voice over their computer or their phone.  It is not dependent on you being on your phone or computer when they hear your message.  They can choose to hear this either over the internet on the computer or they can hear it over the phone and the process is the same.  They dial a special phone number and a special code and then they can hear everything you say.  If you unmute them, they can use their phone to talk as well.

Those are the two simple ways people hear your audio, either over the internet or on the phone.  I definitely recommend you get a USB headset so you can speak over the internet because the quality of your voice will sound much better, but if you don’t have this tool yet, simply use the phone call-in option and that will have to do for now.

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When you host a webinar or a live online learning broadcast, it’s always a good idea to start up your webinar at least 10 minutes before it begins so people can come to the webinar and be ready for you when you start talking.  But the problem that I see when people run these webinars is they will get on even half an hour early and talk on and on and on every minute and pretty much say nothing for half an hour just to keep people who come early to stay on the call.

How do you overcome this?  You wait before broadcasting your audio.  You present a countdown timer and you set up a PowerPoint slide with exact instructions.

The service that I use for webinars which you should use too is called “GoToWebinar.”  One feature that is slightly confusing is when you start a webinar, you first show your screen and then you begin the audio broadcast.  What this means is if you show your screen and have not yet began the broadcast, it will send a pre-recorded message once a minute saying, “The broadcast has not yet started.  Please standby.  Please wait for the webinar to begin.”  This way, if someone comes half an hour before, you don’t have to sit there repeating the same message.  The GoToWebinar service will do this for you.

The next thing that really helps is to show a countdown timer.  You can find any countdown timer by going to Google.com, but I use a piece of software called Cool Timer.  What this lets me do is set the clock for say, 30 minutes, and the time will count down one second at a time on my screen.  Because I’m sharing my screen and not my audio, it will show the seconds taking away so if somebody comes 10 or 20 minutes early, they will know exactly how long they have to wait until the training begins.

Finally, one thing that I always see people forget is to create a PowerPoint slide that has instructions.  Usually, this is going to be the first slide of your presentation.  Give them instructions.  Tell them what the title of the topic is.  If there are special things that needed to do to try on their audio, tell them about that.  If the webinar begins at a certain time, have that in the title slide.  That way, when someone joins your call early, they will first of all get the audio reminder that the webinar has not yet started, they will see the countdown timer, and the PowerPoint will tell them exactly when the training starts.

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