Moms Online Business Coach

In order to pull off a great webinar, you’ll need to plan for success. Sure, there are things that can go wrong, but if you plan your webinar well, most of them can be avoided. Let’s review what you need to do to ensure your webinar will go as smoothly as possible:

1. Choose a good topic. Choosing a topic for your webinar is much like choosing a topic for a blog post. You don’t want something too broad, or you’ll have no focus. And you don’t want something too narrow, or you will run out of things to say. Instead, you want to balance your need to cover new ground with your need to keep the length and breadth of your teleseminar manageable. For your first go-round, I suggest keeping things tight and focused. You should also plan keeping your call to an hour or so. Any longer and you may burn yourself out or run into more problems than you’re prepared to deal with!

   Start by brainstorming a list of possible topics for your webinar. When it comes to scope, ideal topics are suitable for magazine articles rather than books! In short, go through your list of topics and decide for each one whether it is so broad you’d need a book to cover it, or if you could do it justice in a magazine article. Then make a list of your top picks.

   Can’t pick just one? Remember, you can always hold another webinar — and you should! Right now, you’re just getting ready for the first one, so select a topic you feel comfortable with.

2. Decide on an expert. One of the greatest advantages of webinar is that you don’t have to be the expert; you can interview someone else with more experience. You can also hold a dialog between the two of you, or you can do the whole thing yourself. It’s entirely up to you.
3. Pick a day and time. Next, you need to pick a day and time. It’s easy to drive yourself nuts trying to find a day and time that works for everyone in your target audience. Just realize that no matter what you do, you simply won’t be able to pick a time that is convenient for everyone! Instead, pick a time that works for you, and go with it. You can always make the audio available later if you like.
4. Decide on whether to charge or not. Are you planning to charge for your webinar? You’ll want to decide upfront whether to charge or not, and what you should offer as upsells.

That’s it! These are the key decisions you need to make before you get started because they will affect a lot of your other activities. Just keep in mind that they’re not necessarily either/or decisions. There are a range of options you can select, so let’s discuss those in greater detail, starting with inviting an expert.

For more details on deciding the best strategy for your first webinar, pick up my meaty short report “The Top 5 Webinar Formats” and you can choose your direction today!