Earlier this year we started our reseller webinar series covering topics such as upselling and cross selling to your customers, using social media and selling VPS. For many of us, it was the first time we had actually run one. Here are 7 of the lessons I learned from planning and writing our webinars.

Keep it focused, keep it tight

When we first started bouncing ideas around for the webinars the subjects were quite large (e.g. “best practice SEO”) and we found it difficult to cover them in any detail without taking hours to do so. Rather than cover a broad topic superficially we decided to cover a specific topic in detail, and I think it has definitely be the right decision based on the feedback we have got.

Make it practical

Best practice theory is all well and good if you are a large business, but if you are a one man band or a small team, time and financial pressure make this often difficult to do. Additionally, broad theoretical subjects have usually been covered elsewhere multiple times. With this in mind, we try to provide real life practical advice our resellers can apply instantly, and that are specific to web hosting.

Get straight to the meat

In the build-up to our webinar I watched a lot of other company’s webinars and one of the first things that struck me was how long it took to actually get to the advertised content. Up to 10 minutes would be spent talking about the company, partners and products. If I hadn’t been watching them because of my job, I’d have left the session very quickly. We have very few people drop out of our webinars, and I’d argue one of those reasons is because we dive straight in.

Use a script or extensive notes

Unless you’re a seasoned public speaker or ad-lib master I’d strongly advise you have at least some notes, and preferably a script. This way you won’t miss any important information and nerves won’t get the better of you. The webinar will also flow much better for the participants.

Prepare, prepare, prepare

Dress rehearsals are great for ironing out any crinkles in the webinar. These could include becoming more familiar with the software, making sure the script is not too long, making sure the content is fully synched with any animation and identifying human errors such as copying and pasting the same paragraph in to the script twice (that’s one we had!)

People like to ask questions

One of the best parts of our webinars have, for myself at least, been the Q&A sessions we have at the end. They have been a great way to address specific questions we hadn’t covered in the webinar and get feedback from our customers. Because we don’t want the webinar to go on for hours we have always run out of time to cover them all, however, we always make a point of answering the questions we didn’t get around to on our blog the next day.

It’ll (probably) be alright on the night

There is just something about the pressure having to perform that makes things go to plan. Not a single practice run we held in the run up to the first webinar went to plan, with either a script failure or a technical snafu getting in the way. However, as soon as it came to the live performance everything clicked and there wasn’t a single hiccup (#cough#).

The webinar never ends

Directly after a webinar we get lot of requests for copies of the recording and slides (which we always make available via the blog), as well as follow up questions. This is great for us, and exactly what we want. This means people are engaging with what we had to say and have found it useful. Once the webinar is finished, make sure you respond to any requests quickly, as it may be the difference between a new customer or not.