New Opportunities for work life balance with e-teaching Webinars

If you want to take your Blog to the next level, running webinars is a good option and a savvy strategy.

E-teaching is just one online business strategy that can get you off the daily hamster wheel of creating Blog content and social media posting.

Webinars are the first step to e-teaching to test your course and get your first customers. The e-learning customers are there for sure. In 2017, the global online education market was generating $165 billion,  and that’s expected to reach $275 billion by 2022! That means now is the time that you really want to have something in place, based around the idea of online education.

Webinar basics

A webinar is an online seminar for participants anywhere in the world to attend in a virtual classroom. For experts, webinars are an excellent tool to expand and drive engagement with an audience.

A “host” delivers webinars to an online audience called the “attendees.” The host can be the sole presenter or moderator or several speakers.

Keep in mind the best duration of a webinar is 30 – 45 minutes so don’t invite too many presenters.

The link between the host and the attendees is the “Webinar Hosting Provider.”

When choosing a Webinar Hosting Provider, you’ll see there are many different options.

Look for a provider offering a free consultation, a 14-day free trial, good tech support, and prompt customer service. There is no need to work the technical stuff out for yourself; it wastes valuable time.

Webinar Best Practice

The secret to a successful webinar is the preparation and your Webinar Hosting Provider.

The Host

With a webinar, you can expand on the information in a future Blog post. Your audience can ask real-time questions allowing you to understand their needs for deeper connections. 

Webinar’s are a fantastic strategy to test ideas for e-courses and membership sites as well as content for additional Blog posts and products.

Webinar Topic Selection

• If you have a Blog, check to see which posts received proper engagement from your audience. Were there any comments, questions or confusion?

• Look at the Blog content of your Key Influencers and find topics with good engagement. This is measured by the number of likes, shares and comments.

• Choose a topic that you already know people are interested in or struggle with from your 9 am – 5 pm life.

• With a webinar, you can expand on the information in a future Blog post. Your audience can ask real-time questions allowing you to understand their needs for deeper connections.

• Webinar’s are a fantastic strategy to test ideas for e-courses and membership sites as well as content for additional Blog posts and products.

Continuing with your Best Practice strategies:

• Choose the title of your webinar to explain the benefits to attendee

• Know your slides and prepare a script or at least notes

• With additional presenters, be clear on the role of each and stick to the plan

• Practice your presentation, timing and animations, and sound

• Ensure there will be no interruptions, turn your phone off, lock the door, ask for silence and ” Do Not Disturb.”

• Ensure your presentation reflects the problems and needs of the audience

• Show how you can address their issues, frustrations, and challenges

• Teach your audience just enough to give them confidence in your expertise while promoting your information products such as a book, e-course, coaching, mentoring or membership site

• Have an interesting background but not distracting

• Be passionate about your subject

• Mix in proof that you have helped people in the past, provide case studies or testimonials drawing on your 9 am – 5 pm career

• Showcase your expert credentials and why attendees should listen to you

• Be yourself

• Provide incentives for attendees to stay until the end such as a bonus or discount

• Have a glass of water handy

• Make sure your audio is clear and if you face your audience you are looking ok and the light is good
  

• At the start, give clear instructions to the attendees including; how to ask questions; put their hand up; teach them how to un-mute or mute

• Provide a call to action, i.e., the next step you want them to take, where they can access additional information, how to buy a course, a product a thank you, or how to contact you

• Follow-up with each attendee with an email marketing strategy.
  

Webinar Hosting Provider

• A webinar can be delivered live, or recorded for on-demand access, and the software you choose needs to provide the capacity and capability to:

1. Customize the appearance of your slides to match your branding preferences
2. Switch from slide presentations to sharing your screen
3. Take live polls from attendees
4. Register attendees, link the host and the attendees at the scheduled time
5. Send out reminders to registrants even up to the day of the webinar and last hour Integrate with email lists and social media
6. Provide event assistance such as managing Q&A from the audience to you.
7. Download materials such as handouts, printable checklists, and other resources.
8. Provide monetizing integration such as with PayPal and credit cards
9. Record the webinar for future use.

Read on, do some research and be clear on your needs before choosing.

Best day of the week to run a webinar.

For a webinar to be successful people, need to become aware of the event requiring 2-3 weeks of promotions to the host’s network, partners networks, using email lists, social media, and offline strategies.

The Webinar Benchmark report, 2018, shows that up to 22% of the total attendees register on the day of the webinar so keep promoting to the last minute before the event starts.

It seems that Wednesday, Thursday or Friday have the best attendance rates with the weekend and Monday the worst. There are others that prefer Tuesday, so avoid the weekend and Monday. Plan your webinar to run for only 30 – 45 minutes, and additional time for Q&A to further showcase your expertise.

More and more people are accessing webinars on demand, i.e., after the live event. Watching the replay makes sense as 41% of attendees watch in their own time, a substitute for TV or on a long commute. Make sure your record your webinar and have it available it for on-demand replay on your Blog, in your email marketing or social media.

Business Benefits

Webinars have many purposes.

• Information Sharing
• Increasing visitors to your Blog, social media, online course, social media
• Key Note Presentations
• Linking office sites and colleagues located anywhere and nay time
• Coaching and Mentoring
• Education
• E- teaching testing
• Marketing and Promotions
• Sales of products

An adequately hosted webinar can be a significant boost for an expert based online business for many reasons:

Webinars have many other benefits including to:

• Reach a global audience
• Create goodwill for you by providing useful information for free
• Testing ideas, products, services and information
• Create an e-teaching course from your webinar material
• Easily promote your webinar using social media, email marketing, websites, affiliate marketing, Blogs
• Attract large numbers of attendees
• Be place on auto-pilot playing the webinar as a reply on demand
• Test ideas with a focus group
• Have real-time communication with your audience
• Showcase you, your expertise credibility and authority
• Be cost and time effective by reducing travel costs, room hire, hospitality compared with face to face seminars.

As an expert, you can deliver great information and value to a broad audience. Run a webinar once and then set to replay forever creating passive sources of income.

With the webinar strategy, you can teach and people will see your value and will want more, and this is good for business, for followers, your lifestyle, to support the family or give to a cause you value.

So where do you start?

There are different ways of course, and as always I like to start with the lowest price point. There is Google Hangouts on Air with a YouTube Integration for free. The Hangout feature is for chats of less than 100 and to set up in real time, Google “Google Hangouts Set Up” for the most up to date instructions.

There are also many paid Webinar Host Providers. A review of all of the paid versions available in 2018 can be found here “Best Webinar Platforms For 2018”. Read about them, use the Free Trials offered and make your move.