Online Marketing Strategist, Fred Gillen Shares The Power of Webinars.

I love talking to people, especially with the interaction. Again, what I was saying before, it doesn’t have to just be a presentation. It can be an interaction. You can invite attendees to go live and that really fires up webinars. There’s the moment you get somebody else on the webinar that either has a question or has some additional expertise that they share with the audience, then that will certainly get people engaged. It really fires up the webinar.

Two presenters, three presenters, works magic. It’s a nice easy tool. You can set it at a time that suits you. Like we’re doing now. It’s the evening in the States, it’s morning in Australia. I do webinars in the evening here. You can set the time to suit the audience. It doesn’t have to be during the day where you would normally have an all day presentation or whatever. It’s very flexible and gives you lots of opportunities to engage your clients.

CS: Is the number of attendees designated by the software or platform that you’re using?

FG: Yeah. To a degree. The more attendees, and with interaction, if the attendees are just listening, it’s not a major impact, but if you’re going to have attendees share the screen and come on and present, the more attendees, then you obviously need a more stable platform that offers more features. The commercial platforms out there that have that kind of back end, they do charge monthly fees. It starts off, as I said, GoToWebinar is an example, charge I think it’s $20 US as their base package. It allows 50 people on, then it ramps up based on the numbers.

There are other platforms like Zoom that are in competition with that. That’s Zoom.com. They’re in direct competition with GoToWebinar, offer the same features. I really can’t say which is better or which is not. It’s really up to what people get comfortable with. There are a few others. There are also platforms out there that use Hangouts as their back end. You have Webinar Jam and Webinar Ninja, Webinar Geo. There’s a lot of browser based webinar software that actually use Hangouts as their platform.

There are a few opportunities. To get started, there are many platforms out there that will allow you to have a free account. All they do is normally put their advertising overlay on the webinar.

CS: As far as the visual of the actual speaker or presenter, is that something that can happen with GoToWebinar? Is it something that has to be similar to a Hangout or something along those lines?

FG: You can share your screen, which means your computer screen or a window within that screen. If you have your PowerPoint presentation open in one window and your email open in another window, you can actually share the PowerPoint presentation so the viewers don’t see your email screen, so to speak. You can also share your webcam. If you have a webcam on your computer built in, and the majority of laptops and PC’s today have that facility, if not, I’d assume that a lot of people, because they’re using Skype for personal use or whatever, will have a USB webcam plugged in. As far as I’m aware, all of the current platforms that offer webinars allow you to share. Certainly the major’s do, and the ones I use, all allow you to share both the screen and your webcam at the same time, or individually. You can just have you on the screen or you can just have your presentation on the screen or you can have a combination of both.

CS: As many webinars as I have attended, I knew about the screen sharing, but I didn’t know, in the GoToWebinar, you could actually look at the person speaking to you through the webcam. I never knew that.

FG: That’s good. It’s worth being on the call.

CS: Correct. Now I’m going to ask you a really big question that I hope you’ll say yes to. What if someone wants to put on a webinar and they don’t want to deal with all the technical side of doing so? Do you do that?

FG: Let me see. Do we do that? Absolutely, yes, we do that. Absolutely. That’s one of the services. That again is what’s got me really enthused about webinars because in our local community, that was really what started me offering this service, that we had a lot of personal clients that we felt there was a need for them to do webinars and they just said, “No, not my bag.
I’m not into it. The computer scares me. All I can do is use a mouse and I’m a one finger typist.” The normal type of stuff. Then we decided, and it was on an individual basis to start with, I said, “Why don’t I run the webinar for you? I’ll set it up, we’ll organize the emails, we’ll set up the auto responders.” We haven’t talked anything about that yet. “We’ll set up all the
back end tech stuff and we’ll run that for clients as well. Then we’ll present.” Suddenly, the light bulb went on. We started with one, then two clients and now it’s a service that we offer that anybody that wants to partake, can. We actually talk to the clients, find out what they want to present, help them set up a presentation initially and then take it to the next level where we’ll actually send out the invitations, book the webinar and follow through with reminders that the webinar is coming up and also follow through after the webinars. We actually set up the emails that go out after the webinar to encourage people to touch base with the client.

carol santella

Carol A Santella is a Right Hand Advisor and Positioning Consultant to Business Professionals; is a Best Selling Author, Health Consultant, Strategist and Publisher. Carol is also a Radio Show Host for Business Innovators Radio, Host and Founder of Inside with Carol covering Innovators and Trendsetting Influencers in the Fields of Business, Health and Wellness, Medicine, Leadership and Animal Related Industries. Carol is also a Contributor to Business Innovators Magazine, Small Business Trendsetters and the Founder of the Health and Wellness Leaders and Influencers Group; is world renowned for her Acknowledgment and Recognition Model of those who stand out above the rest and assisting them with The Power of Positioning TM. Carol is the founder and operator of The Listener Network which now encompasses her health, communications, publishing and business consulting work.