Econsultancy has a very good article about how marketers can make it easier for consumers to make purchasing decision. You can see the parallel with your webinar invitations. After all, they are a mini-purchasing decision in themselves – your attendees are paying with their time. So if you keep these points in mind when crafting your invitation you will be headed in the right direction.

• Reduce options; The more choices available, the less likely any choice is made. If the purpose is to get viewers to your webinar, don’t muddy the water with other promotions or product information.
• Create urgency; Live webinars are a natural vehicle for building that sense of urgency – make sure to do so in your copy.
• Reduce risk; If your charging for your webinar, provide a money-back guarantee. If it’s free, address the risk that the content will not be worth the potential abuse of contact information – this is a bigger issue for smaller companies that may not have a reputable brand or market presence. They need to engender trust with their copy and remind people that you are not going to abuse the relationship. Remind your reader’s in plain language that you are trustworthy (and make sure you keep your promise):

We do not sell your personal information. We do not spam. We will not call you at dinner time. Privacy Policy

• Focus your message; Simplify your message and stay focused on one or two key points or audience takeaways. Write your copy from the reader’s perspective; ‘What’s In It For Me?’.
• Know your customer;  You cannot convert every site visitor and webinar attendee to a customer, so don’t try. Determine what your key strengths are and go after the best prospects for your product or service. This becomes even more important as social media channels drive greater webinar attendance. Your copy and promotion should actually self-qualify prospects so that you stay focused on the best prospects.

Read the original article at ‘How to turn consumer inaction into action: five tips‘.

Tags: event management, Marketing, Social Media, Web Seminars.

Want to personalize your webcast delivery?

Ken Molay at WSuccess recently shared this webinar presentation tip that resonated with us:

“Speak to the Individual, Not the Crowd”.

Rather than use phrases like “can anyone in our audience tell me ….” speaker directly to each listener “can you tell me …”.

This goes a long way toward personalizing your delivery and leaving your listeners with a more personal experience.

Thanks for the great tip Ken.

Tags: effective presentations, presentations, Web Seminars, Webcasts, webinars.

Webinars. You know they are out there, but inevitably when the topic in question becomes a priority for you, you just can’t find them. Google is your first stop, but the results are just lost in the mass of content they provide. You may visit key industry hubs, but you wonder if your missing anything.

For you there is now a solution:  Webinar Today – the webinar search engine.

Webinar Today Search

We have been busy compiling an index of web seminars, starting with security, storage, marketing, and VOIP.  We invite you to try it out and see what you think.

If you know of webinars that should be added to this index, please suggest them by following the link at the bottom of the page.  As long as they are educational and informational, we will add them to the index.

Now we consider this a beta release, but please let us know what you think!

Tags: LinkedIn, search, Web Seminars, Webcasts.

We edit live webinars to produce event recordings that can be used for post-webinar marketing and training, and think alot about how to get the most out of these live events. Many of our customers will update specific slides or request that we edit out details like pricing that may change over time. Between judicious editing, recording new narration, and adding a moderator voice-over, we can really extend the life of these recordings.

However, there are a few simple things that would make our life easier, and would help any company that wants to extend the shelf-life of their content: Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Editing, event replays, Microsoft PowerPoint, recording, reusability, Web Seminars, Webcasts, webinars.

I must admit that we have recorded webinars that used more than one of these presentation tricks. That can result in ‘Death by Webinar!’

Life After Death with PowerPoint By Don McMillan

Tags: effective presentations, funny, PowerPoint, Web Seminars.

David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) is a must-read for anyone who has that nagging feeling at the end of the workday that they forgot something.  GTD is an organization system that helps you better manage your time and increase your productivity.

Are you wondering just how this is going to improve your webinars and presentations?

One of the services we offer is professional management of web seminars. As part of our service, we provide a practice session and make time for the event coordinators and panelists to rehearse.

We see two things happen -

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Business, event management, GTD, practice, Web Seminars.

As part of our effort to bring a repeatable, scientific methodology to our web seminars we have been reading alot of literature on presentation development .

Currently I’m reading Doug Stevenson’s Story Theater Method; Strategic Storytelling in Business. This is a guidebook that shows how to mine your own life stories to help you connect with an audience.

Right away, Doug makes this point:

The key to becoming an effective speaker is to be authentic. The goal is not to change who you are, it’s to remain true to who you are. To do otherwise is to lose your power. Your power lies in your unique personality and style.

Doug goes on to talk about how actors connect IN to connect OUT to an audience. They go inward to pull from their own reservoir of emotions and experiences. If they do this well, they bring the character to life and the audience connects to them.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: authenticity, presentations, storytelling, Web Seminars.