Five Tips for Presenting a Webinar

I recently had the opportunity to present a webinar on Customer Journey Mapping.  I was excited to take presentation content I had used in a past conference and present to a group via Go ToMeeting.

The webinar was co-hosted by Mike Cleary of Red Wing Shoes, so in preparation he and I connected in person a few times ahead of time to practice.  Like with any presentation, I cannot stress the value of dry runs through content to watch time and focus on transitioning between topics.  I practiced alone in my office, forced a few friends to listen to me, and practiced with Mike both in person and via call.

I have experience presenting in person to groups of varying size, as well as experience moderating meetings that include remote participants, so I thought the webinar would be very similar.  However, while presenting and in receiving feedback from participants following the webinar, there were a few a-ha take-aways I have for webinars:

1. Give yourself ample time to set up and work through glitches.  There are a number of things to hammer out ahead of time, and you want to make sure you are ready to start promptly at the designated time.  I hooked up to the Go ToMeeting the day before, then again 30 minutes before go-time.  This gave me the chance to test connectivity, sound quality, and work through the Go ToMeeting interface.
2. Invite coworkers or friends to attend in person.  Presenting to an empty room was challenging.  Inviting a co-worker to sit in gave me an audience I could see, and some ability to gauge reactions.  My co-worker also could provide me some queues real-time to do things like slow down or speak up. I had my co-worker also monitor the Go ToMeeting for questions so I could focus on the presentation.
3. Stand and smile as you are presenting.  A friend of mine provided me this advice, noting that your energy level changes when you are standing and you can hear a smile. 
4. Involve your audience.  In any presentation, and especially when your audience is remote, draw the audience in with leading questions at the beginning and throughout your presentation.  In a webinar, you can use survey tools to get immediate feedback from the audience.  Creating a feeling of dialog instead of monolog helps the audience remain engaged.  This is a tip I would incorporate more of in my next webinar.
5. Ensure nothing interferes with your presentation. When including things on-screen, such as a survey, be sure you are not overlapping your presentation unexpectedly.  I accidentally covered up email addresses on a slide with my survey, unintentionally confusing my audience by inviting their feedback with no visible avenue in which to respond.

All in all, I found the most challenging aspect of the webinar format to be the lack of visual and verbal feedback from my audience.  Understand that during a webinar, you are competing with email, the web, and many other distractors.  Without the eyes of your audience, it is hard to gauge engagement. The tips above helped alleviate some of that challenge for me. 

A webinar can be a powerful tool when done right, and the opportunity for content reuse in the form of a download makes the investment worthwhile.  However, if you do not engage your audience you could end up talking to an empty virtual room without realizing it.

Do you have any tips to add to the above?