When any technology gets popular, you're going to have a lot of choices as far as which service provider you use. Whether this is your internet service provider, your web host, your autorespondent provider, and choosing a webinar provider or web seminar or webcast provider is no different.
Now the question is, which webinar service should you use to broadcast your live presentations to your audience? Should you use GoToWebinar? Adobe Connect? Dimdim? Ustream or something else?
The service I recommend above all others is GoToWebinar. It has most of the features you would want to run your web seminars. You're not going to have all the features you want but it will get the job done. It's reliable and the service is relatively bug free and inexpensive for what you get.
With GoToWebinar, you can easily run a meeting, show your screen, unmute guests, have panelists, pass the screen to other people, poll your audience, remind your audience about an upcoming webinar, send them follow-ups about a webinar that's already happened and much more. GoToWebinar's pricing starts at around $99 a month which is an easy cost to justify if your webinars can make you a few extra sales.
Adobe's version of webinar such as Adobe Connect are difficult to use and way too expensive. One thing I don't like in particular about Adobe's webinar service is that they show the chat to all attendees.
What's great about GoToWebinar is that when somebody types in a question in the question box, you're the only one who sees it and you can decide whether or not to share this question with everyone else or ignore it or delay it. One advantage of Adobe's service is that you can use a camera to show yourself presenting the webinar, but I found that I usually only care about showing my screen, not some goofy guy in his office with a headset on. Adobe's pricing structure is also very high with some plans going up to $5000 per month.
What about the service Dimdim? In my experience, Dimdim is way too hard to use. They use unfamiliar terminology with me and every time I try to join someone's Dimdim webinar, I can't figure out what the heck I'm supposed to do. Dimdim might be a good alternative in the future and I see many people going to it because it's very cheap but it's simply way too hard to use.
Ustream is a free alternative to webinars. They will allow you to get on camera and talk, and they will broadcast your live presentation to your audience and record it for you as well. But the problem with this
