Today I’m going to cover a subject that many presenters ask about … Actually, that’s not quite right. I should say this is a subject that many presenters get wrong. And they don’t ask about it because they don’t even realise they are getting it wrong!

What’s the subject? Their visuals.

In most cases, this means their PowerPoint and Keynote slides. Depending on your webinar software, you can show other visuals as well. But let’s stick with slides for now.

If you’re an experienced presenter, you probably know how to create engaging slide shows as visual aids in your presentation. But did you know many of those slide shows just won’t work on a webinar?

Why? Because everything you show in your webinar has to be sent across the Internet to your participants. Even though most of them will have broadband access, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll have very fast access (especially in Australia!)

Unfortunately, this means many of the things that first come to mind in enhancing your slide show simply won’t work, because they will be too slow when viewed over the Internet:

• Full-size photographs
• Interesting transitions between slides
• Animated movement to illustrate a point on a slide
• Video in a slide

You have to work diligently to simplify your slides as much as possible so they are sent efficiently to your participants. If you don’t, it will take a long time to load each slide, which will frustrate your audience and break up the flow of your presentation.

There’s a whole chapter about this in the book.

My book Webinar Smarts has an entire chapter (“Prepare Your Slides”) about designing good visuals. If you’ve got the book, I recommend you read it.

I’ll highlight here the four most useful things I think you can do to dramatically improve the performance of your slides.

1. Eliminate waste

If something is on a slide purely for decorative purposes, remove it.

This applies especially to photographs, which are often used (appropriately and tastefully) to add impact to a message. But something that works well in a face-to-face presentation can be too slow in a webinar.

2. Shrink pictures

Photos are great! And of course, they are much better than just slides full of text and bullet points. But they are slow to transmit over the Internet.

It’s a shame to lose these beautiful photos just because you’re doing a webinar! Fortunately, there’s a happy balance: The solution is to keep the pictures, but make them smaller so they are sent more quickly over the Internet.

So, if you’ve got a slide with just a photo and a caption, make the photo smaller, make the caption bigger, and leave a lot of blank space. You’ll still get the message across, and it won’t slow down the webinar technology.

3. Stop movement

Of course, you should remove any animation that’s there purely for decorative purposes. But I assume you’re experienced enough not to use this sort of animation anyway.

However, you should carefully examine all other animation, even if it’s there for functional purposes, and consider how to remove it. The less animation you use, the faster your slides will load.

4. “Build” slides

There is one type of animation that is acceptable – and very useful – for webinar slides, and that is the idea of a “build” or a “reveal”. This is simply where you keep adding bits to a slide as you talk about it.

Fortunately, this doesn’t cause any problems at all for the webinar software. Because each step is simply adding to what’s already there, the software only has to transmit the bits that have changed on the screen each time – and that’s quite fast.

So go ahead and use these slide “builds” to your heart’s content, without worrying about any adverse impact on your webinar. In fact, it helps your presentation, because – as with their use in face-to-face presentations – your audience only sees what’s relevant to them at the time.

Watch this video tutorial

I also ran a webinar about effective webinar visuals for members of my eGurus Community. We talked about how to plan and build your visuals, and in particular some very cool PowerPoint features for creating attractive graphics quickly.

If you’re a member of the eGurus Community, you can watch the recording here.

If you’re not a member, you could buy the recording here for $47. But I reckon you should seriously consider joining the eGurus Community instead. For $55 a month, you get access to this and all of my other webinar recordings, as well as a heap of other useful resources for your business. Find out more at eGurus.info.

Some webinar technology allows audience members to speak up during the webinar. You usually have their microphones turned off (on “mute”), but they can “raise their hand” to ask a question, and you selectively turn on their microphone when they’re ready.

Even when this feature is available, many webinar presenters don’t use it – perhaps because they fear it will break the flow of the presentation, or raise awkward questions they can’t handle. But allowing questions out loud improves the experience for everybody – you, the person asking the question, and other participants. So let’s explore the benefits, drawbacks and strategies for making this work in your webinars.

Benefits

• This greatly increases the level of engagement and interactivity for your audience.
• Even people who don’t ask questions feel more comfortable when they hear somebody else’s voice.
• Some questions require a bit of back-and-forth conversation to clarify the exact question.
• If you don’t offer this option, some people just won’t bother typing out their question because it will take too long.
• You can use this not only for questions, but at any other time you want audience members to speak.

Drawbacks

• You can’t screen the questions in advance.
• You can’t control the order in which you answer the questions.
• Some participants will have low-quality microphones, strong accents or distracting background noises that make it difficult to hear and understand them.
• If they are listening to you through their computer speakers (not a headset), when you answer their question, your voice will be picked up by their microphone and fed back to the entire audience, creating a slightly distracting feedback effect.
• Invariably, some participants will have trouble getting their microphone to work at all!

Making it work

If you’d like to take advantage of this feature, while minimising the risks and drawbacks, here are some tips for your webinars.

• Tell them beforehand that you’ll be offering this feature, and remind them to get a headset and microphone.
• Log in early and test a few users’ microphones before the official start time. This makes them feel more comfortable and confident.
• During your presentation, alert the audience a few minutes before you’re stopping for questions (e.g. “After I finish this slide, I’m going to stop for questions.”). This helps the audience get their questions ready, and avoids the awkward silence that might otherwise occur.
• Before the webinar, ask a few people you know well to have a question ready, in case nobody else pipes up. You don’t need to know their questions in advance; but you do know you won’t get complete silence!
• Finally, start small. Practise with small groups and familiar audiences, so that you become comfortable with the technology.

GoToWebinar, the provider I use for my own webinars, has written a short report “The Definitive Webinar Marketing eGuide”, which is well worth a read.

It includes:

• The 3 biggest mistakes in a Webinar marketing plan (and how to avoid them)
• Easy-to-implement strategies for building attendance at your Web event
• 21 surefire ways to promote a Webinar

and more.

It doesn’t cost anything to download this report, so click here to download it.

Want more special reports like this?

GoToWebinar has published other reports like this, including:

• How to Promote the Value of Online Training
• Live Online Training That Works: Strategies for High Impact Learning and Development

If you’re a member of the eGurus Community, you can get these in the eGurus Vault.

If you’re not a member, I reckon you should seriously consider joining. For $55 a month, you get access to this,
as well as a heap of other useful resources for your business. Find out more at eGurus.info.

When preparing a presentation, it’s important to understand your audience’s needs. And one of the best ways to understand your audience’s needs is to ask them! But it’s not enough to just ask your audience a question – you must ask the right question. The best question addresses their needs. And their needs vary depending on their knowledge of your topic area.

For example, a novice in this area will be evaluating whether it has any relevance. An expert, on the other hand, is already convinced of its value – they just need to know how to apply it.

More specifically, when somebody’s evaluating something, they generally go through four stages:

1. (Why) Is this right for me at all?
2. (What) If so, what specifically is the best option for me?
3. (Who) Who is the right person to offer this service?
4. (How) How do I work with them?

Make sure you match your survey question to their current level.

For example, if you’re a financial planner, your potential clients are asking these four questions:

1. Do I require financial planning?
2. If so, exactly what services does a financial planner offer that are right for me?
3. How do I choose the right financial planner?
4. How do I work with you?

So, when you’re doing your survey to discover their needs, focus on one of these four stages – the one you think applies to most people in your audience.

In the financial planner example, you might ask one of these questions, depending on where you think they are:

1. “What is your biggest concern about managing your money?”
2. “What is your biggest question about financial planning?”
3. “What is your biggest question about choosing a financial planner?”
4. “What is your biggest question about working with me?”

If you don’t pitch your question at the right level, you won’t get useful answers – or you might not get any answers at all!

For instance, if your audience is full of people who have never thought about managing their money – let alone engaging the services of a financial planner – there’s no point asking them what they would like to know about working with you! Similarly, if you’re presenting a new financial product to your existing clients, they just want to know the facts about the product – they don’t you to ask them about general money management questions.

This is important for all presentations, but especially so for webinars, where it takes more effort to capture and keep their attention.

The first few minutes of your webinar are among the most important. They can determine whether your audience will pay attention or will switch off. So put some careful thought into planning the very start of your webinar, and especially how you will engage your audience.

When your audience is in the same room, they know when a presentation is about to start. If they’re chatting, standing or otherwise distracted just before you begin, when they see others sitting and paying attention, they’ll stop what they are doing and follow. Although you still have to keep their attention right from the start, you don’t have to do much to get it in the first place.

You don’t have this luxury with a webinar. Your audience isn’t in the same room, they might be distracted by other things, and they can do other things without worrying they might be distracting others. Because of this, you have to work harder to get their attention initially.

One way to do this is to ask them to do something early in your presentation. This forces them to take notice, involves them right from the start, and demonstrates this isn’t just another boring presentation.

For example, you could:

• Conduct an on-line poll
• Ask them to draw or write something
• Leave part of your handout blank, and ask them to fill it in

The idea is to design something easy but engaging. It doesn’t have to involve them sharing anything personal – in fact, it shouldn’t, because that’s too early in the presentation for them to share with others – but it should involve them doing something.

Don’t ask your audience to do difficult things too early. Start with small low-risk activities, and build up gradually to the more difficult tasks. This is known as “ramping up” the interaction.

For example, in some face-to-face presentations, the presenter asks participants to introduce themselves and state what they would like to learn from the presentation. I generally recommend you don’t do this for a webinar. It’s asking too much from strangers who are uncomfortable with the technology to share personal details over a telephone line.

So when you’re designing your interactive activities, build them up during the presentation. For example, here’s a logical sequence for “ramping up” the interaction:

• Show some introductory slides before the webinar starts.
• When it starts, you start speaking but don’t ask others to speak.
• Ask the audience to write down their objectives for the webinar.
• Ask them to respond to a poll (low risk, because they just have to click a button).
• For the first Q&A segment, read out questions they’ve sent in advance, rather than opening up the webinar for live questions.

By going through this sequence, you help them become comfortable with the technology and the environment. This eases them into the interaction, so they are more likely to participate later.

If you’re a presenter who wants to deliver your material by webinar, the secret is to forget you’re doing a webinar, and structure it just like any other program. There’s nothing magical about the webinar format. It’s just another medium for delivering your presentation. You prepare the content just the way you would any other presentation, and you deliver it in (broadly) the same way.

Let’s look at some of these options.

Keynote presentation

If you give keynote presentations, design your webinar as a keynote-style presentation, with the aim of changing their attitudes or shifting their beliefs. It will probably run for 45-60 minutes, with you doing most of the talking, and perhaps a brief Q&A session towards the end.

Be careful with trying to adapt a keynote presentation to the webinar format. Webinar audiences expect high content. Some keynote presentations are very light on content, which can be acceptable in a conference room. But on a webinar, your audience can’t see you, can’t see each other, won’t speak up as readily, and won’t do interactive exercises unless there’s a very clear point to them. In general, you can’t rely on the energy and “showiness” of a face-to-face presentation.

Training session

If you’re a trainer, your job is much easier. The webinar format is ideally suited for transferring skills and knowledge through education and instruction, provided the teaching doesn’t depend on the participants actually being in the same room.

If you offer your webinar as a training session, you’ll be teaching them skills. It might be about an hour long, with a handout they download in advance, and exercises they complete during the session. You’ll still do most of the talking, but you might have more than one opportunity for them to ask you questions, and you’ll allow more time for questions.

Broadly speaking, you take the material you typically deliver in a face-to-face training session and adapt it for delivering by webinar. You can still use slides, handouts, workbooks, asking questions, asking for a show of hands, and even initiate group discussion.

Training course

The next logical step is to present a multi-stage training course. If you can do one webinar well, it’s only a small step to present material as a series of webinars. Rather than a one-off event, you present the training in smaller chunks, perhaps with “homework” between each session.

Even if you’re not doing training this way in your face-to-face presentations, consider how you could do that using webinars. Webinars lend themselves well to this sequence, because they have such a low overhead. Some of your material might be better delivered as a course, but it might have been too difficult to run a face-to-face event each time.

Interview experts

Webinars allow you to bring in other experts for your audience. Although you can do this in face-to-face presentations as well, that is rare – perhaps because presenters think they themselves need to be the only expert in the room, and their credibility would be diminished if somebody else was also delivering material! For some reason, interviewing experts by webinar doesn’t have the same stigma. In fact, if some people attend your webinars regularly, they will appreciate hearing from your guest presenters as well.

If your guest is already a skilled presenter, they can simply treat the webinar just like any other training webinar. However, you might also have the situation where your guest is an expert, but not a skilled presenter. In that case, you don’t want to force them to make a presentation. Instead, run it as a one-to-one interview, with the audience silently “eavesdropping” on your conversation.

Panel Interview

The next logical step is to interview a panel of experts. If you have experience in this area already, again a webinar is an effective medium for conducting your interviews.

Even with a panel of experts, you can add visuals to enhance the experience for the audience. Of course, the larger the panel the more difficult it is to manage this, so plan it carefully. For example, you might decide only you show visuals – a particular Web page or document, for example – and then call on the panel to comment on it.

Facilitation

If you’re a facilitator rather than a trainer, you can still use a webinar to host your presentation. The key difference here is it’s your job to create the right environment for discussion among the participants, rather than being the expert with the presentation. So you set the scene, and then open the webinar for the audience to do most of the talking (with your guidance, of course).

Coaching and mentoring

So far we’ve talked about webinars as being for group presentations. But there’s no reason you can’t use them for one-on-one presentations as well – in particular, coaching, mentoring or consulting. If you run a webinar as a coaching session, you’ll be asking lots of questions and giving the client more time to answer them. So you might ask a question, and then give the client time to answer it.

If you’re conducting mentoring sessions by webinar, you’ll combine the training and coaching modes – that is, a mix of teaching and asking, with some time for you to speak and some time for them to interact with you and with each other.

Presenting remotely

Finally, one other use of webinar technology is for you to make a presentation remotely (in other words, when you’re not physically present). The audience might be gathered in a room, but you make your presentation from elsewhere.

You might have seen this already in the form of videoconferencing, where a speaker is “beamed in” to a conference or meeting. That is still an option, of course, but it has some drawbacks: It can be expensive, it might require special equipment at both ends, it needs a fast Internet connection, and the audio and visuals don’t always synchronise correctly.

Doing it by webinar is far easier, and often more effective. It doesn’t require as much Internet bandwidth, it doesn’t need any special equipment at your end, and you can show a slide presentation as well.

I came across an article, How to Promote Your Webinar Or Webcast on a Budget, by Eugenia Cosinschi, with some simple but very effective tips for promoting a webinar. She has kindly given permission for me to re-publish her article here.

First of all, you should consider starting promoting the webinar 2 to 4 weeks before the delivery date. If it’s sooner, you won’t have enough time, if it’s earlier, the impact will be diminished, since people generally need a sense of urgency in order to act on an offer.

So here are some tips and tricks on how to promote and market your webinar or webcast:

1. Publish your webinar on your blog or website

This is the first natural step. Even if you use an event management website (such as BrightTalk or EventBrite), publish it on your website or blog as well.

2. Optimize your webinar page for search engines (SEO)

Use keywords in the webinar title (however, don’t go overboard and have a 4 line title), in the first paragraph, in links and headlines. It’s also useful to make your keywords bold. Limit yourself to 4 or 5 keywords because, if there are too many keywords, your page relevance for each keywords diminishes. It’s also advised not to repeat a single keyword more than 4 times on a page, it can be considered keyword spam if you do.

3. Send a press release

If you don’t want to pay $80 to $360 to PRWeb.com, there are many sites that publish press releases for free. You can find here a list of 50 press release submission website. Don’t forget advice #2 when writing the press release.

4. Send a newsletter

If you have a subscribers list, don’t be afraid to use it. If you don’t, go to the next advice.

5. Use social media to promote it

Publish your webinar or online event on Facebook and LinkedIn (they allow events posting) and invite people from your network to your event. Post regular updates in Twitter. Post your webinar on forums in that particular field. This is a sensitive topic, you need to be a regular member and post frequently on those forums, otherwise you might be treated as a spammer. Post it on digg, reddit or StumbleUpon.

6. Publish it on website that promote webinars

There are lots of websites that promote webinars and other online events.

7. Create partnerships

Give a discounts or a number of free spots to a partner website’s members in exchange for promoting your webinar or web conference. Do cross promotions: you promote your partners’ products (books, online events or even webinars), they promote your webinars.

8. Notify your contacts

Send them an email or, better yet, place a link to the webinar in your email signature. It’s a good way to advertise a product to your contacts without being intrusive. They might just be interested in your webinar or recommend it to someone else who is interested.

9. Publish a video teaser on YouTube

YouTube is being used more and more as a search engine. It’s well indexed by Google (actually, it belongs to Google) and will help you get more visibility.

10. Start a contest

In order to generate interest (and even quality links) you can start a contest, offering either a free spot, a free product or service or anything else you thing others might value.

11. Paid advertising

And the last resort, pay for advertising:). You might use some PPC (pay per click) advertising networks such as Google AdWords.

Good luck!

Webinar Base lists the most interesting free webinars, webcasts, web conferences and online courses on different topics, from social media, sales, business, to real estate or design.

Today I’d like to touch on a subject that many presenters forget: what to do after your webinar is complete. Most presenters do nothing, and maybe that’s OK in some rare circumstances. But you can leverage the power of your webinar by doing some effective follow-up stuff.

Andrew Spoeth has written an excellent blog post
How to Manage Successful Webinars: A Post-Event Checklist on this subject.

He has 13 tips, including very simple things (like removing the webinar listing from your events page) to more sophisticated actions (like evaluating the webinar results with your team). Not all of them will apply to you, and not all of them will apply every time. but I’m sure some of them will make your webinar far more effective.