1 0 Archive | September, 2010
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What Are The Steps To Running A Webinar?

Chances are you've already joined someone else's web seminar training. But if you have not yet hosted your own, you might be thinking what exact steps am I going to have to take in order to set up this live presentation. It's easy. Luckily, there are only four steps: Print the webinar, get the registration link, send people to that link, and run your webinar.

Setting up a webinar is very easy especially if you leave most of the settings at their default and don't try to customize your webinar all that much. Services like GoToWebinar allow you to get crazy and ask attendees for their full address, phone number, allow you to create your own backgrounds when people register for the webinar. But really, you don't need all that extra stuff. You can leave most of these settings at the default.

All you need to do when creating a webinar is think of a title, think of a time and date, and think of what you want to ask the people who register. Personally, I only ask people who register for the first name, last name, and email address. And that's it.

Once I've created that webinar, once I have the title, time, and date, I get a special link. When people click that link, it shows a form where they fill out their first name, last name, and email address, then they're given the time of the webinar and they are later on sent reminders to come to the webinar.

So all you need to do is, step 3, send traffic to that link. The more people who go to that link who are targeted, the more people will sign up and the more people will show up to your live webinar. And the GoToWebinar service will send reminder emails automatically more and more often as the webinar day approaches.

Then when it's time for them to join, they click a link, they join your webinar, and they see your screen. They'll hear your audio which you can use either from a microphone plugged into your computer or from the telephone. You can dial in a special phone number and talk on your telephone and they will hear exactly what you say while you show your screen. And it's that simple.

And those are the four steps to running a webinar: Create the webinar, get the registration link, send people to that link, and finally run your webinar.

Don't webinars sound fun and easy? They are. Find out just how easy and fun at www.webinarcrusher.com.

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29. Sep, 2010
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What’s The Difference Between GoToWebinar, GoToMeeting, and GoToTraining?

It's hard enough to decide which service provider should host your webinars, your live online video presentations. But even if you find the right service such as go to webinar, how can you decide which type of webinar you're going to run? Citrix has three flavors of webinars: They have a service called GoToMeeting, a service called GoToTraining, and a service called GoToWebinar. So which is right for you?

GoToMeeting only allows a maximum of 15 attendees. This means you definitely cannot have a very large audience. But I find GoToMeeting useful if I need to meet one on one with someone such as a business partner and show my screen in addition to talking.

The big difference between GoToMeeting and the other flavors of webinars is that with a GoToMeeting, all of your attendees are automatically unmuted. And that's pretty much the only special thing about GoToMeeting is that it's capped at 15 attendees and all of those attendees are unmuted.

GoToTraining is a relatively new service provided by GoToWebinar which gives you extra features such as tests built into the webinar and you can share files as well. GoToTraining only allows up to 200 people in a training session. Honestly, you don't really need these features such as testing or file sharing because if you're running a training program already, you probably have a blog or membership site that has these features already. Therefore GoToTraining doesn't excite me all that much.

GoToWebinar is the service I use for all my webinars. With GoToWebinar, you can choose between plans that allow for up to 100, up to 500, or even up 1000 attendees. More than a thousand people can register for a webinar, but when it comes time to get on the webinar you're limited to 1000 people.

And GoToWebinar includes everything you need: You can poll your audience, you can unmute people, you can read questions. It has all the features you need and GoToWebinar includes access to GoToMeeting, that way you can use the meeting features to meet one on one with somebody to plan your upcoming webinar and then use your actual webinar to show your presentation to a large audience. GoToWebinar has a free trial so you can try it for a whole month to decide if it's right for you.

And those are the differences between GoToMeeting, GoToTraining, and GoToWebinar. In a meeting, you're limited to 15 people and everyone's unmuted. In a training you're limited to 200 people and it has extra features you don't really need, but with GoToWebinar you have everything you need and you can present up to 1000 attendees.

I hope that helped you make a better informed decision about what kinds of webinars you're going to provide. Get the exact training you need to run your own webinars at www.webinarcrusher.com.

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26. Sep, 2010
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How to End Your Webinar Course

You've just run a four- or eight-week webinar course, or maybe you haven't begun the course but you're looking ahead and trying to figure out how to wrap everything up into a tidy little package. You should end your webinar course with a critique week, with plans for a reunion Q&A call, and the pitch for the next class.

People—and by people I mean your students—learn a lot better when you provide them with course correction. Do you really thing that if you had attended high school or college, and only read from books and not had a homework and nobody wants to ask questions, that you would have learned the same amount of information? Probably not. The same is true with the webinar course you are providing to your subscribers. That's why as the course is wrapping up, preferably in the last week, you examine their work and tell them what to change.

The best thing about webinar technology is that you can do this in many ways. You can go to their website or look at the dosh from which they have sent you, and show people how things look on your computer. But you can also pass the screen to them. That means if you are teaching a class about email list building, you could show people how their squeeze page and how their welcome emails appear to you, but you can also pass them control of the screen and have them open up their auto-responder campaign for you and you could tell them what to change.

Even after the critique week, you should reconnect with your students in 30 days. The reason for this is because you wanna give them enough time to apply what they have learned in the class, but they are also some of your best buyers and you want to get them sold on whatever next class you're offering. Thirty days is a good length of time because everyone can catch up and reconnect, and remember how much they got accomplished with your training. This also gives you time to put together a new training course and give them a special link to join early or join at an introductory price. You can set this call up as a way for them to try what you've been teaching but in a more long term basis and have questions ready and have websites or written materials for you to review in one month.

But some people want to join the next class now. And that means if you have the next class ready, there's nothing wrong with pitching them the next class. After all, they paid you money and you taught them something that had a much higher value than what they paid. Therefore, they got more out of the deal than you. Therefore it's only natural for you to give them the chance to get even more out of that deal and join your next class as you and your student make a good fit. They learn a lot from you and you enjoy helping them.

And that's exactly how your webinar course should end—with a critique week, with a reunion Q&A call scheduled for 30 days in the future, and with a pitch for your next class preferably pitch it now at the end of this class and pitch it in one month at the reunion call.

I want you to find out exactly how I have set up and profited from multiple webinar courses over and over again, and how you can do the exact same thing at www.webinarcrusher.com.

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24. Sep, 2010
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How Do I Run A Webinar If I’m Not Technically Skilled?

If you're not the technical genius in the house, you still can run a webinar. The reality is, you only need to make sense of a few screens when presenting your webinar and most of the fancy features can be ignored. Most people who tell me they are not technically skilled enough to run a webinar can overcome that by using one of three strategies: By reading the manual and finding out just barely what they need to know, by having a dry run of the webinar, and having a buddy to handle questions and do the fancy stuff.

Reading the manual works wonders. I always tell my customers before asking me a technical question, read the manual first. And the funny thing is when most people ask me a question, I can find the exact part of the manual they did not read because the manual explained it.

Training companies like Citrix, which provides GoToWebinar, is always adding to their manual. And if they have a question that comes up very often, they add it to that documentation. So chances are, your question or issue has already been addressed inside the help manual. It can't hurt to read it just to make sure.

The next thing you should do before running your first webinar is run a practice session. Get a friend to join your webinar and act as if it's real: Practice starting the webinar, showing your screen, running through your presentation, polling, and even ending the webinar just to make sure everything looks okay. You will be a lot more prepared and a lot less stressed out when it comes time to run that webinar.

And finally, have a buddy or a co-presenter who can look at questions from the audience or even start the webinar for you and show your screen. You probably have some computer friend you can pay $10 to be with you on your webinar or use your neighbor's son or someone who knows computers. Even if you are technically skilled, it is way easier to ignore the questions and ignore all the fancy controls and simply present and allow your co-host to interrupt you or tell you about questions that are coming in.

Go ahead right now and run your first webinar even if you aren't technically skilled at www.webinarcrusher.com.

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23. Sep, 2010
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The Exact Week-By-Week Content to Place inside Your Webinar Course

So you are teaching some kind of weekly class online. Maybe you're running it for free to your subscribers or maybe you're charging them some amount of money to attend. Now that you know what you will be teaching in your course, what specific content should you teach each and every week?

When planning your weekly content, don't forget the instant gratification, the critique week, and the meet in between.

Most people who teach classes already have a clear picture of what they want to start with. They have a introductory week and then build up to the intermediate or expert level weeks. But the number one thing missing with a weekly webinar series is the "instant gratification". Start up your course so that even if somebody only took the first week of your training, they could get some kind of tangible result out of it. The idea here is that people are so excited by that first week of training that they wanna take the rest of your class.

If you're teaching about writing, your students should walk away from the first week with a complete article or a complete outline for their book. If you're teaching video, students should be able to record their very first video by the end of the first class. Start them up small but start them with something.

You're gonna have classes in between. This is the "meet" of the class. You get them excited about your class and you get them to join based on what they want, and once you give them what they want, transition them to what they need. Writing an article or writing that first chapter of their book is fun, but the rest of your class is to make sure that they finish that book and they can edit that book. Creating a short three-minute video is fun but the rest of your class should be dedicated towards creating an entire video product or video series.

And this is all leading up to the final week which you should devote entirely to examining other students' work. This is the "critique" week. If you're teaching people how to write a book, the final week should be masterminding your students' book launch campaign, or looking inside the books and telling them what to change. If it's a video class, watch their videos and give them pointers. After all, they paid you for a live training. You should give it to them.

The great thing about anything with the critique week as well is you can show off other students' results, and the students themselves are much less likely to refund because they saw exactly what they got out of taking your class.

And that's how you should structure your webinar. Start the first week with something that gives instant gratification and immediate results. Have weeks in the middle transitioning them from the basic topics all the way to the advanced topics, and ends with the critique week.

Organize and launch your first four-week or eight-week course right here at www.webinarcrusher.com.

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23. Sep, 2010
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Exactly How to Charge for Your Next Webinar Course

When you're running a webinar class, it's deceiving about how much you should charge. Your time as a live person who is presenting live and answering questions live is much more valuable than a simple video or report. That means you should charge higher than normal, but what should you charge? You should charge $97, $197 or $997, and I'm about to tell you when you should charge at which price point.

If you're running a mini-course or mini-series, which is basically two webinars of 90 minutes each, you should charge $97. You could run the first class one week, give people an assignment, run the second class, and then give them a second assignment. This gives you three hours total. First is as live trainings but also as video recordings, and you can also get these webinars transcribed. You speak at 150 words per minutes, which means this comes out to a 27,000-word eBook. I'm not the biggest fan of transcripts and I believe you can still get away with charging $97 for two webinars and two challenges.

Now, what if you wanna go beyond $97 and give more extended training? A four-week course where you deliver four webinars and four challenges and have a place to interact the blog comments inside a membership prices, should be priced a minimum of $197.

If you wanna go even further to a full-pledged eight-week course with a couple of extra bonuses, as long as the topic is exciting and you can explain clear benefits and immediate gratification, you can charge $997 for an eight-week course.

But you might charge less depending on the topic. For example, I'm not sure a webinar class about creating your own graphics could be charged at $1000—maybe $500 or $300. On the other hand, a class about real estates, programming, blogging for profit, and so on, is a good idea for a $997 product, as long as you have tons of proof and can demonstrate that your training will earn your students at least $1000 over the course of the next six months. If you can pull that off, you can price your webinar course at $997.

And those are the three situations when you should price low, in the middle, and high. Charge $97 for a two-part course, $200 and up for a four-week course, and up to $997 for an eight-week course.

Now that you know exactly what to charge for your webinar course, let's go ahead and make one in record time using the training available at www.webinarcrusher.com.

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22. Sep, 2010
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Run Challenges inside Your Next Webinar Class

Remember back in school when you were taught something and you were given homework at the end? If you're teaching something over the internet, live, using a webinar, you should also give assignments to your students after your training is done. You taught them one simple thing. Now it's time for them to go out and apply it. But you are a much more interesting person than the teachers who taught you at school. And that means you should deliver challenges instead of homework.

What is a challenge? It's where you tell people what they should do next and if they don't do it, they're still in the class, they don't necessarily fail, but when they do it, they get some kind of reward. But just like homework, this is deadline based to make sure they do it right now.

If you're running a class inside a membership site on a private blog, create a separate blog post and then it explains an easy four-step action to take after that week's training.

If you're teaching a class about blogging, and the first class shows people how to get a blog set up, you might then ask people these four questions: Question 1: What URL will be a place to blog on? Question 2: What will be the name of this blog? (and) Question 3: What will be the first post in this blog? Question 4: What time and date will this blog be set up?

It's important that before you even worry about people completing the steps, you need them to commit to the steps and commit to the deadline before doing anything. That's why the last question in your series of four should always be "What time and date will this be finished by?" And you can even place restrictions such as require their deadline is within the next seven days. This is great if you're running a multi-week course because it ensures the people finish the challenge before the next module has begun.

After everyone commits to the challenge, create another blog post where people can come back and report on their results. They've already told you what URL the blog will be set up on so all they have to do is come back and post something such as "Done." or "I am done." as a comment in that special blog post. And now you have a list of everyone who has finished the assignment. Because you're running the class, you can always click and check to make sure all the blogs are set up and then leave those comments that are lying, but usually people will be honest because the other students check on each other's work.

And by completing those steps, you have now done a webinar challenge. You thought of an easy action to take directly related to this week's training in four steps, and get people to commit to the steps and deadline, and then report on their results.

Run your own webinar course, charge it at whatever price you want, and get as many successful case studies from your own training at www.webinarcrusher.com.

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21. Sep, 2010
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What Components Should Be Inside My Webinar Training Course

When you host your own web presentation or webinars, you might not be aware of the ways you can present your training. You can present things as straightforward presentations, as "question and answer" sessions, or as follow-ups and challenges, and in a perfect world, you'll have all three.

A normal presentation is exactly what you think it is. You open up a PowerPoint on your computer and broadcast your screen to your webinar audience—to your students. Then you present just like you will present a PowerPoint in a live setting. You demonstrate things, you speak about things, and when it's appropriate, you switch off the PowerPoint and open up your web browser or open up a program on your computer to show how to do something.

I have a student who teaches embroidery webinars. So he teaches how to manufacture different items and organize them, and it involves having a step-by-step process and an Excel spreadsheet. She explains the whole system and goes through the process she uses in her shop so that other people who embroider can do it faster and can mass-produce their materials.

A regular presentation simply teaches your system to others. But people might have questions, right? That's what the Q&A session or "question and answer" session is for. You open up the floor to questions. It's a good idea to tack on a "question and answer" area at the end of your webinar or even check your questions throughout.

And something else I like to do if I'm running a high-ticket course—which means the course that cause a lot of money—is have a special day just for answering questions. I might run a weekly webinar Tuesday afternoons, but on Saturday mornings I'll have everybody on the call and ask their question. In other words, what things did my training leave out? For me, my training was complete but when they went and tried the things they taught, maybe they ran into some problems I could not foresee for their specific situation. And I would answer them.

Finally, it's one thing to run live webinars for your students, but you need to check in with them and make sure they are applying the things you teach them and doing what they say they did. That's why it's a good idea to at least make an extra blog post in the middle of the week or send out an email for the group asking them if they all finished their assignment and if they need help just as a reminder.

At the end of each week in a webinar course, I love to produce challenges. This means that if I just taught somebody how to write a blog post quickly, the challenge would be to apply what they have learned and write a blog post quickly. Having reminders and challenges can't hurt.

And those are the components you should have inside your next webinar course—a presentation, a Q&A call, and follow-ups and challenges. If your course is a low-ticket course, you might only have one or two of these items, but if it's a high-ticket course, you wanna have all three.

Robert Plank is an expert in webinars. Get access to his training at www.webinarcrusher.com.

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20. Sep, 2010
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What Do End Users Have To Install To Attend A Webinar?

If you have never attended a live training presentation or a webinar and if you have never hosted a webinar, you might be wondering what do people need to install on their computers to view this presentation. And I hope it's not the one thing holding you back from webinars because nowadays, people don't have to install anything to attend a webinar.

That's right, it's a zero-install process but there are a few difficulties you should know about. When I say there is zero installation when someone attends their webinar, that means that when their browser comes to the webinar join page, a Flash or Java applet appears depending on which service you used. Then the webinar client installs in the background while the webinar is loading up.

The first time you join a webinar, it might take a few extra seconds to install the software and you might be prompted to run something, but other than that there is no program to install. It installs on its own.

Most webinar services, including GoToWebinar, will install their software easily on a Mac just as well as a PC. But because these technologies are Flash and Java based, these will not install on any phone including smart phones like an iPhone, Droid, or BlackBerry, but it will install on a desktop or laptop computer.

One thing that you should be aware of is with GoToWebinar, the technology is not 100% Mac compatible. As a presenter, the screen sharing doesn't always work properly and the USB headset you will be using does not always sound properly. They might fix these issues in the future but for now I definitely recommend that if you want to present on a webinar, you run a PC or at least a Mac running Parallels. However, if you are joining a webinar or if your users are joining your webinar and they are not going to be showing their screen or speaking, a Mac will do just fine.

I hope that opened your eyes and made you realize that your end users do not have to install any special software to attend your webinar. The software installs itself as long as they are on a desktop or laptop computer, meaning not a cell phone. They need to be running a browser that can run Flash or Java, and if they are presenting, to not use a Mac.

Now that you're ready to become a star and run your own webinars, go right now to www.webinarcrusher.com.

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20. Sep, 2010
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The Refund Policy for Your Webinar Course

When you offer any kind of training, some people might not like it. Some people might join and decide later they don't necessarily have time for your training, or they might not have correctly understood what you're offering and thought they were joining something that they really weren't.

On the internet, the perfect way to just wave all these fears is to offer some kind of "risk reversal" or a refund policy, a period of time after your customer buys when they could decide they want to cancel and refund which means they're kicked out of the class and they get their money back. But how long should your refund period be? I am about to tell you that.

Your refund period should be 30 days. Thirty days or one month is plenty of time to decide if your course is right for someone. I would go as far as saying 7 days is enough time for someone to decide, but let's give your customers the benefit of the doubt and allow them the full 30 days.

This might seem scary to you but the majority of people will not refund. In fact, the refund rate is usually under 5%. If it's near even 10%, that is a high number. And you can reduce refunds by sending out follow-ups and reminding people to consume your content. You can send physical bonuses such as headsets or DVD training and require people to mail them back to you in order to get their money back, or even have some kind of activation system on your software so that if someone refunds, their software is turned off. That's only fair, right? You gave them their money back so it's as if the transaction never happened.

But the easiest and most common sense way to reduce this refund period is with drib contents which might just be some bonus blog post or audio files and drib bonuses if they stay in. For example, I might deliver one extra bonus per month for a six-month period even if somebody only paid me one time for a course.

The great thing about bonuses is it also reminds people that you do exist and you have other training for sale. When it comes down to it, you want to build the best possible relationship with your customers and your customers don't always know how great your training is until they've joined it. That's why you want to be generous with your refund period and offer a 30-day no questions asked refund policy on your webinar courses.

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19. Sep, 2010
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