So you’ve got your topic, you’ve been sending information to and inviting your customer base. You’ve advertised it on your blog and Twitter and Facebook/MySpace.
Now what?
Send a reminder – email your registered attendee’s their login information and all important information right before the event. This will make them more likely to click over and attend. You’re looking to create that “Oh yeah!” moment with them.
Prepare – Don’t try and wing it, practice your presentation – and make sure to time it. Do a walk-through. Soup to nuts, as Tim is so often saying. Make sure as many of the kinks are out of your webinar as is possible. You probably won’t catch them all, but at least you’ll be better prepared.
Presentation – The way you approach and create your slides is important. You want to make sure they’re visually appealing and offer key points to what you’re talking about. But stay away from shoving as many words as possible into your slide. Make the slides easy to read. Short and to the point. Try checking out some really great slide presentations at Guy Kawasaki’s blog.
Support– The event will go better if you have another pair of hands and eyes. Have someone there to help field questions, monitor the Q&A window and in general be a helping hand. If you Twitter, consider making a #tag for the event. For our last event the hashtag was #dtmpa. There is a great explanation of what Hashtags are and how they came into exisitance can be found on the Twitter Fan Wiki.
Bonus tip– As a presenter, you want to make sure you’re giving as professional a presentation as possible, so think of the little things before you begin. If you’re sharing your computer desktop for the presentation, check out your background image, hide icons for your favorite games or shortcuts to websites. Turn off your instant messenger, your Skype and anything that might give off an alert or “take over” your focus during the presentation. Because Murphy’s Law is never more in effect than when you’re presenting something in front of 200 potential customers.
In the final part we’ll go over follow-up tips.
