If you are a business coach, I highly recommend using webinars to grow your business and provide a service to your clients. I also highly recommend helping your clients find ways to use webinars to grow their business or service their clients.
They’re an exceptional tool to reach out, connect with, educate and sell to you market.
Yet it is SO easy to make simple “school boy errors” which mean your hard work, preparation, marketing, finely crafted message and delivery fail to reap the full benefits.
And as a beginner I made them all!
I’m sharing them with you in the hope that you can learn from my mistakes.
Here they are in their full, unmitigated glory!
1) Forgetting to record the webinar!
This is cardinal sin number one. A webinar is not just for the group who engage live. It can become a product, a sales video, a training video – in fact anything in which you need to deliver ideas and information can be done using a webinar and used after the event to send to clients, prospects or joint venture partners…IF you press the Record button!
In the excitement of welcoming the group, it’s easy to forget to record so I have found the simplest way is to write on A4 paper in BIG letters RECORD and then drape this over my screen so I can’t miss it!
2) Not sharing the screen!
You’ve gone to all the trouble to put together a beautiful slideshow with well constructed bullets and images that evoke an emotional response. You’re delighted, proud and excited to present to it.
And then you forget to share your screen!
And all your delegates see is the welcome slide from the webinar provider. Worse still when you get a recording of the webinar it’s all black! You know nobody is going to sit through that as most people enjoy visual as well as audio stimulation.
So underneath Record you write “SHARE”
3) Starting the webinar too soon.
Yes, I’ve done this too. It’s not in broadcast mode but you have officially started the webinar and time is ticking away on the duration you have allotted. I was meant to be running an hour webinar from 8.00pm and pressed the start button 7.45pm to be prepared. I didn’t press broadcast so I knew nobody could hear me. What I didn‘t know was that the clock was ticking down. So at 8.00pm I now had just 45 minutes left! Disaster.
So make sure you get to know how your webinar service works and how to start in practice mode ready to broadcast.
4) Trying to respond to people’s request to be louder or quieter.
We don’t know how someone has their system set up and many people are IT-hopeless. So delegates will type that you’re too quiet, too noisy, too tinny, too squeaky! It puts you off your stride and you start worrying more about that than the content. You desperately eat the mic in a bid to be louder.
Stop!
Instead, make sure you get your volume right from your end before the webinar starts then be confident in your settings and know that the attendee needs to adjust THEIR volume! Tell the group your volume is tested and to simply control their volume accordingly.
5) Unmuting the attendees for questions.
This is not a good idea for a sales webinar though potentially perfectly useful for a training webinar. The problem with unmuting is twofold. Firstly, you get all the uncontrolled noise from that person’s environment. Dogs barking, TVs blaring, dishes chinking kids screaming along with any audio feedback their phone or computer creates for the system.
Secondly you can’t know the quality of their personal input. With all the best will in the world, some people ramble and tell you the story of their life before asking a simple question you have already covered. Some asked insanely technical questions that relate to nobody else on the webinar.
Instead, stick to typed questions. You’ll get through more, answer them better and tackle them at the right time.
Summary
Now, these are all basic errors but they’re simple to make and can have a devastating impact on the quality or future usefulness of your webinar. Get it right and you’ll make more sales, develop better content and enjoy your webinars a whole lot more.
