Creating, producing and delivering a successful webinar can be one of the best ways to inject income rapidly into your business IF you are prepared to be organized and wear a number of different hats to get the job done.
These hats include, but are not limited to:
- Stakeholder — The person who carries the most risk of loss or gain when you plan your webinar.
- Producer — responsible for making sure you have everything you need in terms of products, money and supplies for your webinar. The producer will also be responsible for screening calls and questions if you you plan to allow them before or during the webinar.
- Coordinator — responsible for organizing and coordinating the entire webinar, keeping everything running smoothly while you give your presentation. They might also organize handouts, free downloads for attendees before, during, or after the webinar.
- Marketer — responsible for promoting it in order to be sure people show up for your webinar. They will also help follow up when it is over in order to grow your email marketing list, or help make a sale. They should also continue to market to the people who have signed up for the new email marketing list you will create as a result of the webinar.
- Manager — responsible for organizing everything to make sure nothing is missed. They will also coordinate with the performer/s and technical support as needed.
- Performer — One or more people who give the presentation or conduct the interview, or coordinate the webinar, panel or summit. What will happen if someone does not show up, or experiences technical difficulties? This person should be prepared to step into the other’s shoes to make sure everything runs as smoothly as possible in front of a live audience.
- Technical Support — responsible for the technology, platform, hardware, and software before, during and after the event in order to ensure that it all works properly and as expected. They should also be able to help all the speakers and attendees use the software or interface as needed, deal with sound levels, muting, unmuting of the phone lines if you are allowing questions, and to get rid of the background noise you will get a lot of when people attend, and so on. They will also help run any special features particular to the webinar hosting service you are planning to us, such as desktop share, an ewhite board, and so on.
A webinar can be an excellent chance to raise the profile of your business, launch a new product or service, or show new customers the kind of quality information you have to offer as a coach or consultant. But as you can see, there are quite a few pieces to the puzzle when it comes to hosting a successful online seminar.
These are just a few of the hats you will need to wear if you wish to start hosting webinars in order to boost subscribers to your newsletter and make more sales. You can do it all yourself if you are super organized, or you can assign these roles to staff or colleagues, or even outsource these tasks to one or more friends or outsourced workers.
For example, one or more virtual assistants can handle any number of these roles very well such as: Technical support, marketing, coordination and even producing, as they screen the questions and answers that come in before and during your presentation.
But if you are running a small business without a lot of staff or extra cash, chances are that the overall person responsible and likely the main stakeholder is you. This means you will have to perform one or more of these roles in an efficient manner and still be able to maintain your calm in the face of a live audience and any technical glitches you might encounter.
In Part 2, we will discuss some of the ways to deal with all of the roles efficiently.
FURTHER READING
