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.
