Know-How Exchange : Social Media

The biggest problem I see with webinars is attracting a big enough audience. "How to market your webinar" is the topic I'd be most interested in.

As for content, one of the things that annoys me most in a webinar is slides loaded with bullet points and/or lots of text. As a presenter, I've found Cliff Atkinson's book ("Beyond Bullet Points" -- Amazon link: https://amzn.to/9muyOR) helpful in that regard.

As a prospect, I always ask myself if the benefit of attending a webinar will be worth the time and cost. It's painful to sit through the first 15-20 minutes of a webinar to see if it's worth sticking around for another 40-50 minutes to finish it.

Since most webinars are so bad, I've had to screen out all but the most attractive ... and it's hard to distinguish among them in advance.

Dear SRyan,

Over the last year I've listed to at least 50 webinars and they've all—ALL—been the same:

1. Lots of roll up, roll up, limited space before we shut the doors hype. And normally, from three or four different sources (depending on how many lists you're on).

2. 5 minutes of people all over the world saying hello and telling me where they're calling in from.

3. 5 minutes of "We're muting the lines now!" and then another 5 minutes of more people saying hello.

4. 5 minutes (at least) of one idiot asking if the other idiot is there, wherever the hell "there" is.

5. 10 minutes of "Well, hello everyone! We've got a packed agenda tonight, but before we get to that, here's ten minutes of inane crap before we introduce our guest and listen to another 10 minutes of his
or her inane crap, after which we'll burn another 10 minutes explaining what we're going to talk about, and in which we'll hint about a great
offer coming up right at the end that we're all gonna love!"

6. 5 minutes throughout of telephone lines fading in and out, dropping off, or breaking up, just at the good bit, leaving us thinking "What did h
e say? What was that? WTF?" and so on.

7. The wrap up and THEN, God help us, the 15 minute introduction to
the upsell or offer that will ONLY be available at this price TONIGHT, and only to the first 50 callers who can take advantage of this package that normally sells for $2,997, but that tonight, can be yours for ONLY $297!

Promise me you'll change my life AND that you'll avoid ALL of these tricks, tactics, and time sinks and you'll have my attention for 90 minutes.

I hope this helps.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA
The Direct Response Marketing Guy™

As Gary & Michael note, there's too much fluff.

Is there any real benefit to having a "live" webinar? For the most part, I'm content with time shifting my viewing of a recorded webinar to a time that's convenient to me. If you take a webinar, and strongly edit out the fluff, my guess is you'll reduce the length of it by at least 50%. Not just the up front welcome-wait, but also the interruptions, the umms, and side-tracking. Edit out everything but what's important.

Can you provide a transcript of the webinar in addition to the audio/video? I personally like to skim the text, and will slow down when I read something of interest. With most webinars, there's no way to speed up the audio rate. If the transcript is interesting, then I'm tempted to go back and listen to the presentation itself.