There are specific rules for conducting webinars and guiding the organizers and presenters when organizing and holding the event.
Following the positions of the rules allows you to do your online training as efficiently and interestingly as possible. Just before the start of the online conference, you must perform the following steps.
Non-standard methods of conducting webinars
So, how to conduct a webinar?
- Download all demonstration materials on the server side, and check their availability and readiness.
- Check all the necessary equipment: microphone, headset, and webcam.
- At the very beginning, the method of conducting a webinar involves the following sequence:
- Welcome address to the participants of the event.
- Ensure all or most participants are present at the conference and proceed to the main part.
- The main body of the webinar itself covers the following:
- Record the webinar and make the recording available to everyone who attended or registered, which matters most for paid events. Use full-screen mode when sharing slides and demonstration materials to give participants a better view.
- Maintain visual contact with the audience and stay inside the camera’s field of view.
- Avoid talking to people who join late because the welcome message was shown right at the start of the event.
- The method of conducting webinars involves technical experts’ involvement in solving various issues and problems that often arise during the event. Best of all is somebody with real experience of clearing technical problems as they happen.
- If the event’s topic is complicated and participants are likely to have questions, bring in a moderator. Their role includes collecting participant questions, providing answers on key issues, developing practical recommendations, and engaging with participants in the chat.
- Bringing in extra specialists and keeping firmly to the timings lets you concentrate fully on the subject and run the event at the highest quality you can.
- Last preparations before the start of the webinar broadcast. On the day before you:
- Set up event reminders (one hour and 15 minutes before the start);
- Upload presentation and additional materials to the webinar room;
- Make sure all presenters register.
How to conduct a webinar successfully?
✔️ Preparation of speakers
Try not to change the materials and not hold rehearsals on the last night before the webinar. Usually, this is just once again tiring and bad for the appearance of the speakers. You need to have some good rest and sleep enough before having a webinar. Coffee dehydrates you and dries out your mouth mid-speech, so be careful how much of it you drink while chasing alertness.
✔️ The cut of one’s jib
When choosing clothes for the broadcast, avoid small checks and narrow stripes, because a camera turns that kind of pattern into a shimmering mess. It is also best to avoid wearing the same colour as the background you will be sitting against. If you put on a white shirt and sit on a white wall’s background, they will merge, and you will get a comic effect of the head without a body.
Webcams often highlight even the tiniest skin imperfections. If you want to look your best, especially for women, it can help to apply a bit more foundation or use a corrective type of makeup. Also, try not to sit facing or sideways to a window that lets in direct light, because this position can make your face appear darker on the screen.
About your voice
It is necessary to warm up your speech organs so that the voice sounds beautiful, and the tongue does not stumble. There are many techniques from different public speaking coaches. I like the ten-minute TED talk by Julian Treasure, "How to speak so that people want to listen."
It will be great if you and your speakers can do gymnastics, recommended by Julian for voice. If there is no secluded place for gymnastics, and you are embarrassed to frighten unsuspecting colleagues around the office, you can drink warm water to warm up the vocal cords and eat a banana. Yes, yes, I am not kidding; it is a banana. It contains magnesium, calming nerves, and you get a good workout for the lips and jaws.
You need warm water on air as well. Be sure to put some glasses of warm water next to the speakers on the table. Even if you did not strain your voice at rehearsals, you would worry more during the broadcast. In addition, it often dries in the mouth from excitement, and an unpleasant tickling in the throat interferes with speaking.
Besides, studies show that this kind of reaction spreads easily. If you start coughing, there is a good chance your coworkers will feel the same irritation in their throats. Taking a small sip of warm water will help relieve these symptoms quickly.
Preparation of equipment and a room
Ventilate the room where you will hold the webinar well, and hang a sign on the door, so you are not disturbed.
I advise you to use a headset with a microphone, the kind call centre operators wear. The built-in laptop speakers or smartphone headsets’ sound quality is much worse.
Check the charge level of laptops and headsets and better connect them to a power source. It would be nice and neat if there were a spare laptop with a headset. Strange things happen, and equipment sometimes refuses to work in the middle of a broadcast.
Make sure you have an internet connection with good speed. All webinar software has a list of technical requirements for Internet speed, screen resolution, and browser version. Some platforms provide a service "on duty" by a tech support specialist at your webinar to troubleshoot the difficulties that arise quickly.
Soundcheck before conducting a webinar
Before the broadcast starts, conduct a sound check with all the speakers to ensure that they have an image from the webcam and microphone. There are different approaches to how to do it correctly.
- Soundcheck in the webinar itself, but half an hour before the start. Each presenter goes on air in turn for a moment while you check their video and sound. That part will need cutting out before you send or publish the recording. The option is convenient, but the first viewers can come in advance and see your soundcheck and correspondence in a live chat.
- You can take another approach by creating a small separate webinar for the speakers about an hour before the main session. Use it to test the sound and video in advance. Nobody else will see you, but keep in mind that this does not fully guarantee a smooth start when you go live in the main webinar where your audience is waiting.
There are also different opinions on how to conduct the remaining time after the soundcheck before the official start of the webinar. Some webinar organizers ask the presenters to stay on the air with cameras and microphones turned off. It is safer than leaving the airwaves because if you reconnect, you may suddenly have difficulty.
Yes, indeed, there is such a risk
However, I do not like this method because the empty windows at the site of the alleged speakers usually irritate the viewers. Connecting to the webinar, they are afraid that the webinar has already begun and does not have video and sound. Then they start to write disturbing messages in the chat, and the moderator has to calm panicked viewers. It is not a very convenient beginning of the webinar, so we do not do that. After soundcheck, we go off the air and leave on a screen a screensaver with the name of the webinar, photo speakers, and the start time or the presentation’s first slide.
How to behave oneself during a webinar
We launched a webinar room, conducted a soundcheck, and a webinar screen saver, and viewers are gradually gathering. Let us talk about webinar etiquette.
The webinar starts with the webinar room launch, in which guests gather and wait for the speakers. It is necessary to greet guests to remind the start time of the broadcast. If you have several moderators, they should all say hello to the guests in the chat.
See how many people have turned up. The number of viewers is usually shown next to the chat. A good turnout is 30-50% of the registered.
Do not be discouraged if only a few people turn up. The webinar goes to the recording you send to all registered and put on your YouTube channel for everyone. However, it will still be necessary to analyze the reasons for the low turnout and take action in the future.
One minute before the start, announce that you are about to go live. Press "Speak", wait three to five seconds, and then start talking. Usually, viewers see and hear you with a delay of a few seconds, so if you start speaking right away, the beginning of the phrase will be cut off.
How to conduct a webinar in a better way
With a camera or to leave an off-screen voice only?
Many first-time presenters do not dare speak with the camera on, embarrassed by how they look. Some experienced webinar organizers ask their invited speakers to talk without a camera in order not to overload the Internet channel.
I advise you to overcome shyness and conduct webinars with a video camera from the very beginning. Therefore, it will be much easier for you to maintain contact with the audience and for the viewer to perceive the information. You must agree. We understand a partner in conversation much better when we see his face.
Going on air, greet the audience and make sure they see and hear you well. After that, introduce yourself and your colleagues if you are not conducting a webinar alone. Next, meet the audience; invite them to write about themselves in the chat. Finally, tell the audience about the webinar’s planned duration and whether you will send the recording and presentation to the participants. After that, you can go to the central part of the report.
During the presentation, monitor the number of visitors to your webinar. Visitors usually arrive within a few minutes of the start, after which the numbers should settle. However, something is wrong if you see that a sharp outflow of visitors began in the middle of the webinar. The audience was probably bored because the speaker’s tone was too monotonous, or they became tired because the speaker was too energetic and intense. Sometimes the topic promised in the webinar title does not match what the speaker actually talks about, and the presentation turns out to be mostly promotional. The audience usually dislikes this kind of approach.
Our task is to keep most visitors until the end of the webinar
In addition to an interesting report and charming speakers, use interactive tools to hold attention:
- Staged reveals. Give the information out in parts, so the audience stays with you and waits for each next slide.
- A pointer. Help the audience follow your thinking by pointing at the item on the slide you are talking about.
- Drawing. Highlight the essential points on a slide in front of the audience with the pencil tool. You can take a chance and invite them to underline something or write on your slides.
- Ask questions while you talk. Let people answer in the chat, or run a quick test.
- Share your screen. Show something interesting on the subject of the report. For example, we show our client request processing system on our webinars, and this works better than a few dozen slides.
- Give presents. Encourage viewers to download valuable webinar content live on the air.
How to answer questions
You can take questions as you go, if you are not afraid of losing your thread, or hold them for a dedicated Q&A block at the end. In any case, the guests will start asking you questions from the beginning, which is good. If you do not want to be distracted during the webinar, you need not answer them straight away. However, be sure to say that you see the questions in the chat and answer them later; otherwise, the audience will be offended. While giving a presentation, your colleagues can answer questions, and then you will explain the remaining or new ones.
When something goes wrong when you conduct a webinar
Let’s talk about some webinar "horror stories," meaning the most common situations when things can go wrong during a live session.
✔️ Voice troubles. Your audience does not hear you
Try to get out of airing and come back. Most often, it helps. If not, try to leave the webinar room entirely, go back, and go on air again. If two or three attempts do not help and you are not presenting alone, signal a colleague to take over on air.
Then, try to find what is causing the issue. Make sure the headset is turned on. Open the headset settings in the webinar system and confirm that the system recognizes your headset instead of the default device. If that does not help, try using another headset, since you probably brought a backup for the webinar.
Usually, some of these tools help. If none of it helps, get the duty support specialist of the webinar platform MyOwnConference on the line straight away.
✔️ Video troubles. Your audience does not see the image from your camera
Just as in the case of sound, first try to get out of the air and enter it again.
Turn off on the laptop all the programs that can be using the camera, messengers above all. Connect with a webinar technical support specialist. If you cannot solve the problem quickly, warn viewers that you will be holding a webinar without a camera, and start.
It makes sense for speakers to upload photos into the webinar in advance, which will be used as avatars if you cannot restore the video. Better viewers see your picture than a blank screen.
✔️ Sound or video switched off during the webinar
Viewers complain that they have stopped hearing from or seeing you
If all viewers complain, then the problem is on your side. Therefore, we urgently make all the recommendations from the previous paragraphs. If one or two people complain, then only they have the problem. Ask them to refresh the page (F5), and if their connection is too weak, have them turn the speakers’ video off altogether. If all else fails, promise to send a webinar recording.
✔️ The audience asks too many questions online, so you do not manage to respond
This is not a "horror story," but one of the criteria for success. You interested your viewers. Choose the most interesting questions and answer them, arguing your selectivity with time limitations.
✔️ You forgot your speech, do not remember what is there on the next slide
It is okay because the guests do not know what the text should be. Calmly open the next slide, and take a sip of water. If you cannot remember the original version, improvise. Say a couple of phrases and move on.
You do not know the answer to a question
We are all human and cannot know absolutely everything, especially if the problem is narrowly specific. Thank you for the interesting question. Tell them that you need to think about it and promise to answer it personally outside the framework of the webinar. However, it is better to answer questions directly related to the topic of your presentation.
✔️ Somebody asks deliberately loaded questions
The general rule is not to feed the trolls. If no witty answer comes to you at once, say plainly that you will not be answering questions of that kind, and then ignore them.
✔️ No questions
Silence in the chat is scary. Prepare two or three exciting items from the "We Are Frequently Asked" series and tell them while your viewers gather their thoughts and come up with questions.
Platform failure happened; the webinar is over. It is all over, chief!
Luckily, this doesn’t happen often, and I’ve never had to do it myself. But, if it ever does, you’ll need to email everyone right away and let them know the webinar is canceled or postponed.
After air time
Well, I hope nothing terrible happened on air and that you dealt with the difficulties quickly. We complete the webinar. Speakers say goodbye to the audience on the air, then in the webinar chat. The last moderator says goodbye and closes the webinar room. The webinar is over.
After the webinar is finished, remember to process the recording, remove anything unnecessary, and make sure the audio stays clear and high quality. On many webinar platform services, you can run a session and then send the recording with a single click, but I prefer to prepare a complete follow up email that includes a link to the webinar platform recording, the presentation, and any extra materials.
And, of course, we in the marketing department process and analyze leads from the webinar, watch the turnout percentage, and study interesting questions and wishes of our viewers. We welcome the regulars back and watch the new arrivals enter our marketing funnel. I hope this advice proves useful and that your webinars bring you both pleasure and results.
FAQ
What is a non-standard webinar method and why should I try it?
A non-standard webinar method is any approach that goes beyond the usual slide plus speech combo to increase engagement and memorability. You should try it because it helps keep viewer attention alive, makes your event more dynamic and helps you stand out among many webinars.
How can I keep people watching until the end of my webinar?
You can hold attention by delivering information in parts so that viewers keep expecting something new, by interacting via chat or polls as you go, by highlighting key points directly on slides, and by offering something valuable during the live event so participants see advantage in staying.
What should I do if sound or video fails during the webinar?
First try to exit the broadcast and re-enter it. If that does not help check your microphone or camera settings or switch to a spare device if you have one. If issues persist tell the audience you will continue without video or that you will send the recording afterward.
When is the best moment to answer participants’ questions during a webinar?
You can answer questions during your presentation when it does not disrupt flow, or reserve a dedicated Q&A block at the end. If many questions appear early say that you will see them and answer later so the audience feels heard even if you postpone some answers.
What should I do right after the webinar is over?
After the webinar ends say goodbye to participants both on air and in chat then close the room. Then edit the recording removing unneeded parts, send a follow-up message with the link to the recording and extra materials, and analyze metrics like turnout, questions, and feedback to improve next time.
