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This document will give you the key concepts and guidelines presented by Ken Molay in his web seminar on how to create and present “Killer Webinars.”

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It is important to clearly define your goals at the outset so that you can measure your success at the end of your program. We will wrap up by returning to this point. Different webinars have different purposes and you need to be explicit about what you are trying to achieve.

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Our six-step program uses an alliterative approach to help you remember the stages. From initial planning through post-event activities, we'll cover requirements for event organizers, administrators, and presenters.

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Success begins with proper planning of course.

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Your goals for what you want to achieve with the webinar dictate what pieces of information you will include. Your understanding of your audience's motivation and interests change the way in which you present and frame that information.

You should be able to write down your audience's expectations in a summary line, just like your own goals. Check your content against your description of the webinar that your audience sees. Are you delivering what you said you would give them?

A box of Lego bricks is like your facts. Clever and imaginative people can figure out something to do with them, but it might not be what you intended, and it isn’t for everyone. But once you put the picture of the fire truck or spaceship on the box, your audience self-selects for that interest level and has a clear goal of what they should accomplish with your building blocks.

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Think about your target audience’s geography very early in the planning process, because it forces you to consider many important things... Where is our audience and what is convenient for them? Will I need multiple sessions to cover different time zones? Does that change how I set up (or license) the web conferencing software? Will my presenter(s) be available for the sessions? Do I need to promote things differently based on language, time, or call-in information?

Your ideal goal should be to present to business audiences no earlier than 9am in their local time and no later than a 4pm end in their local time.

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Now we move on to the technical production steps.

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Putting together a webinar involves a large number of small details. None by itself is difficult, but if you forget and let something slip, it can impact a chain of other things farther down the line and you can find yourself with a panic situation near the event date. An organizer should be in charge of keeping track of all the little tasks and milestones to make sure you are hitting your key dates along the way and that everything will come together to make your event work. Keep a list of responsibilities and deadlines and nag the right people at the right times. Somebody has to be the bad guy!

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An early task in the production work is to get registration pages set up, tested, and ready to accept signups. You need them in place when your promotional activities go into play.

In general, the fewer fields on your registration page, the more likely that people will complete and submit it. Initial registration on a marketing webinar is not the time to do sales qualification. You need to get people to hear your message first… THEN you can move on to gauging their interest and desirability as a customer.

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If you are charging people to attend, it adds another layer of complexity to the registration process. Give yourself plenty of extra time to integrate payment processing with your web conferencing vendor's software. This is a good place to get outside expertise involved if you are using third party systems. A very few webinar technologies have payment collection built in to their registration system as an option. Here you see a screen shot from AnyMeeting showing options during the webinar scheduling process to specify pricing for the live event and access to the recording, along with discount codes you can set up.

Note that almost all third party vendors take a cut of your revenues for handling the collection of funds. Adjust your expectations for net income accordingly.

Make sure you have a process in place to handle refunds for dissatisfied attendees or people who missed your event.

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Once you start working on content, the usual rules of good presentation design apply. Keep information large and clear. Avoid text in strange orientations and layouts, and make sure you use high contrast between text and backgrounds. You can never be sure about your audience's monitor size or settings. Their poorly set brightness and contrast controls become your problem!

You should also avoid overuse of fancy animation effects. These can quickly become tiring when they are applied to text items and may not display smoothly on older or slower computers or for attendees with slow connection speeds.

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It's a good idea to create a way for your audience to give you additional feedback and follow easy click-through links to action items you want them to take. Most web conferencing programs have a way to display a web page during or after your event. Create and test your page well in advance of the event itself.

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You should also think ahead to how audience members can see an archived version of your webinar. Will your web conferencing vendor host the recording on their servers or will you host it on your system? Do you have a standard page where you list all your archived events, or do you need to create a special viewing page and link? If possible, determine the link to the archive ahead of time and build a placeholder. You want to be able to announce the location during your event or immediately afterwards, even if the recording takes longer to produce. We'll come back to this later.

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Promotion is the step that is likely to cost the most, need the most planning, and give you the most headaches. You have many options and can customize your approach to fit any budget.

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Before you start promoting your event, figure out what people will see when they respond. A landing page gives more detailed information about your event when you can't put all the details in a marketing channel. Many landing pages can also serve double duty as HTML-formatted email invitations.

There are many factors that determine whether a landing page or invitation is likely to be successful. One of my favorite reference works is The Landing Page Handbook available from MarketingSherpa. It costs $500 but is worth every penny in improving registration rates.

Any good marketer will tell you that guidelines are helpful, but you need to test different approaches to truly find what works best for your events and your audience. Test and measure is your mantra in marketing!

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If you are putting on a free marketing or informational event advertised to the general public with a “shotgun blast email,” you can count on a response rate (registrations) of one-half to one percent. And then only one-third of your registrants will show up. The numbers get better for highly targeted lists, training classes, and other webinars of interest to employees or current customers.

Asking people to pay to attend obviously cuts down the number of registration you will get, but it significantly improves attendance rates. Still, even a pay-event will get missing attendees, which is why a refund or follow-up policy is mandatory.

People will register for a free event well ahead of the date, knowing they can always skip it if something else comes up. But you will find heavy registration counts for pay events in the 36 hours leading up to it, as people check schedules first before deciding to commit their money. So plan marketing promotions to match your likely registration interest period.

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Renting email lists is an expensive proposition. Work with a reputable vendor or broker who can guarantee compliance with spam regulations and won't get you onto a blacklist. Once your reputation is ruined, it is very difficult to recover. The better you can target a specific demographic, the better your performance will be. If you say, "Anyone might be interested in our webinar" then you have no criteria for selecting recipients. You'll spend more money with poorer results.

Beware of inexpensive lists from smaller providers. They almost never produce quality results (and often have obsolete contact information). List rental is typically best left to large enterprises selling very expensive items. When one or two sales cover your entire cost structure, you can afford to spend more up front.

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Don't forget free avenues like the home page of your website! A banner ad on your home page will do MUCH better than a sub-page in your site of "upcoming events". If you keep your site updated with the next upcoming webinar, it gives people a reason to keep coming back to see the latest and greatest information.

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Announce your event in a press release. There are low cost and free press release distribution channels available online. This gets the event into search engines and makes it discoverable on the web. Make sure the landing page or registration link is clearly mentioned in the head or sub-head. The subject, date, time, and link should be right at the top of the release in the first paragraph. Your press release should be designed for search efficiency, not for the traditional use in stimulating a reporter to write about it.

The major press release services such as BusinessWire and MarketWire might cost up to $400-$500 for a release. Whereas services such as PRCompass and PRLeapcharge $0-$50. The difference is in how rapidly and extensively the listed items are picked up by search services and syndication sites.

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If you happen to work in an enterprise with a significant sales and marketing organization, get them to add a registration link in their signature block on outbound emails. It acts as a free distribution channel that can spread as emails get forwarded. You can add a hyperlink to your event’s landing page.

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Newsletter sponsorships or advertisements can be expensive, but they pay off if you are going after a highly targeted audience served by the newsletter. Make sure key information is prominent with a clear incitement to link to your event.

Now that so many people are blogging, you should try to find a blog that covers you topic area and see if you can submit something or influence the blog author to mention it.

Social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook often have groups dedicated to an interest area. Find the groups that your targets would belong to and mention your event.

It is important to stress the value to the audience and the relevance to the interest area, rather than simply placing an ad that serves nobody but yourself.

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Search engine ads can also produce good registrations if you have very specific keywords that interested viewers would be searching on. You can control your costs and see results instantly in this medium, allowing very fine-grained tuning of your efforts. But costs go up rapidly for more popular keywords, so this works best for niche subject areas.

If you already place pay-per-click ads for your company, ask the coordinator if they can swap out one or two to point to your webinar landing page instead of the company home page. This is easy to do and to track for effectiveness.

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What do we need to think about in preparing to deliver the event?

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The single most important thing in ensuring success is to rehearse. Then rehearse again. Then rehearse some more. This is also the most unpopular activity in webinar production. It's boring, repetitive, and takes time away from other tasks. But it is an integral part of putting on a webinar and should be planned and emphasized as an expectation from the beginning.

Each speaker should deliver the entire presentation as if an audience was listening. It's the only way to establish timings and to identify places where the right words are difficult to find.

You should have a technical familiarization session to make sure everyone knows how the software works and who is handling what responsibilities.

And in multi-speaker webinars, make sure the presenters have a chance to see each others' material ahead of time and work out who hands off to whom.

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I recommend scripting an opening and closing paragraph or two. This makes sure you can move into your topic smoothly and finish without forgetting important items. But for the main content, it's much more effective to have bullet point notes for reference than to use a completely written script.

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Know how long you have for each part of your event. Work out a table of milestone timings for the introduction, speaker content, Q&A, wrap-up, etc. This makes sure that you know whether you are on track during the event. If you have multiple speakers, put your most experienced and comfortable presenter last. That person can adjust the presentation if necessary to account for the prior speakers going short or long.

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Things can go wrong when you involve computers and the Internet. Have a backup plan in place.

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Print a copy of your slides and notes. Log in as a presenter on two computers at your desk. Have an assistant on a separate computer (preferably a separate network) ready to advance your slides for you if you lose connection. Ideally you should be dialed in on two separate phone lines in case one drops. These might not all be practical for you, but give yourself as much chance as possible to recover from a problem.

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Now we talk about the presentation itself.

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Because your audience can't see you, you don't have the same freedom you have on stage to pause and collect your thoughts. Three seconds of silence is enough to pull your audience out of the content and distract them with wondering what has happened. Did they lose connection to the conference? You need to continually refocus their attention on you and your presentation by using your voice. If you are not on camera (which takes additional training and practice), your voice needs to be “bigger” and over-emphasized in order to accomplish the engagement that is normally handled through body language and facial expressions.

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The number one dissatisfaction that presentation audiences report is presenters reading their slides out loud.

If you can read your slides out loud to your audience, you have poor design. A presentation must not be a white paper on a screen. Use graphics to support and emphasize the points you make vocally.

For more on this topic, you can copy this URL into your browser:

http://wsuccess.typepad.com/webinarblog/2011/10/the-one-step-approach-to-better-presentations.html

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Make sure to interact with your audience throughout the course of your presentation. People hate it when they feel that you are simply declaiming out to the air and that it doesn’t matter whether they are present or not.

Mention first names to build a sense of connection (It is usually not a good idea to use full names without permission). Run polls. Try some interactive games or questions that make the audience interact with the computer. It helps develop the psychological bond between you and your audience, which is implicit in a local seminar, but lacking in a remote presentation.

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Don't cancel out the advantages of conducting polls and other interactive devices by using them purely for your own needs. Everything you ask the audience to do should be framed in a way that lets them think it is for their benefit. If you merely ask a series of intrusive sales qualification questions, they feel badgered, rather than a part of a dialog. Always appeal to their self-interest.

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When your event is over, you still have work to do.

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You have a very short window of opportunity after your webcast to engage your audience. If people get something of value from you, they briefly lower their defenses and are willing to talk to you or follow up in some other way. But that feeling goes away quickly, and within a week or two, they mostly forget about your event entirely.

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Don't wait until after the event to create handouts or extra materials. Have them ready for distribution or download right after the event.

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You need to measure the successfulness of your webinar on the criteria you established at the beginning. Did it achieve your main goal?

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Each webinar should be a learning experience that helps you identify what works well and what needs improvement. You can use your data to help you pick different days and times, get additional training or assistance, try different promotional channels, or restructure your content.

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By viewing all the steps of a webinar from start to finish as parts of a whole, you can generate better success than with concentration on one piece at a time as if it was a self-contained independent task.

AnyMeeting graciously handled promotion and technical provisioning of this presentation. I encourage you to take a look at their offerings, which can give you a cost-free way to get into the world of webinars.

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Thank you for your attention and interest. I always welcome your comments, questions, and feedback. You can reach me by email or by using the contact form on my website. I also maintain The Webinar Blog at www.TheWebinarBlog.com and I have a junk-free Twitter feed at @klmonline.