How to Start a Webinar

So you've decided to run a webinar. Good for you! Webinars are a wonderful way to create information products. In fact, they are probably the easiest media for the new learning content creator.

But how do you start a webinar?

First off, you need to put the old "I am different" argument away. All learning content is roughly the same. Only in the design and the actual creating do they differ. All products need to follow the same basic structure and process. What is different is the number of sub-topics (or chapters or modules) and the number of items to be covered by each sub-topic and section.

In other words, you need to start your webinar with an introduction.

Traditionally, a webinar starts like a live seminar. It begins with a number of housekeeping elements.

For example, a typical webinar might start like this:

1. Title page

2. Welcome

3. How to ask questions

4. Who is giving the seminar

5. A personal picture or family picture

6. What will be covered (topic)

7. What will be covered (table of contents)

And in many ways this traditional intro makes sense. The title page exists because people will be joining the webinar over an extended period of time. In fact, one of the tricks is to tell everyone to sign up 5 minutes early in order to get on. The title page helps these early folks to know they are in the right place.

The welcome page helps to start the webinar and make the audience feel valuable. (You know they are -- they don't know that you do.

In a live seminar or speech, you need to do a bit of housekeeping. Such as telling the audience where the washrooms are. How to use the microphones. How to exit the building in case of fire. And so on. None of which exists in a webinar. But its equivalent does. Things like how to ask questions. Should you mute or is everyone muted from the beginning etc.?

Because not everyone attending a webinar knows the speaker it's important to introduce them and why they should be listened to. In a traditional live speech this is where the speaker walks on. Unfortunately, unlike most other video formats, webinars don't normally show the speaker. To make the speaker human, pictures of the speaker are useful. Especially if those pictures are of them doing normal human type things. After all, you want the audience to like you.

In a traditional live speech, the first words you hear from the speaker is the introduction and the content. Specifically, what the topic is about and what will be covered in the seminar or speech. In a webinar the speaker typically has been doing the speaking all along. And he or she simply continues on telling the audience what will be discussed in general terms and then goes into the details of what will be covered. Effectively this is the "Tell them what you will tell them" portion of the old training saw.

And it's not a bad way to start. But there is a better way!

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