How to Host a Webinar

Planning to host a training webinar? Good for you - but know this!

A training webinar, very popular these days, can be extremely effective educational tool – when you do it right. On the other hand, when done poorly - it can bore your audience to sleep.

Therefore, if you want to keep your audiences awake and listening, this is what you need to do and remember:

A)     Focus on the content and prepare! Webinars requires a lot of planning and preparation. Your content should be on topic and (please) do keep it brief. Prepare in advance on what you plan to say and avoid digressions and improvisation.

B)     Make your webinar interactive! One of the biggest mistake’s webinar hosts make is lecturing instead of leading a meaningful online discussion. Use virtual team training tools, such as virtual whiteboards. Otherwise, you can just record a lecture and post it on YouTube.

C)     Importance of presentation! Remember, all the rules of LIVE presenting still apply to you (as a host) even if its on-line event. The best content will fail if your audience is asleep or doing something else while you speak.

D)     Learn! Failing to gather feedback from attendees of your training webinar is a luxury you cannot afford. As it is your chance in getting a unique perspective of your training experience. From a short online survey after, you can have priceless intel on what’s working, what needs to be improved and which topics your audience would like to see in the future.

In a nutshell, as a host you need to remember these points when preparing for a training Webinar. For sure we could go into fifty shades of grey whit this and talk about all sort of details, such as: what technology platforms you could use, what is the best time in a day for a webinar, how long should the webinar last, ect.  Yes, All fair and good points!

My advice:  prepare, keep it simple and interesting – it’s the best way for keeping your audience coming back for more.