Webinars are a powerful lead generation tool for your business.

But John Rydell admits that sometimes, they can feel overwhelming to plan.

While planning a webinar can be stressful and time-intensive, it doesn’t have to be.

The key is to focus your effort on what’s important. Do that, and the webinar planning process can be simple.

You know the 80/20 principle, right? It was discovered by Italian Economist Vilfredo Pareto in the early 1900s when he realized that 80% of the wealth in England was held by 20% of the population.

Richard Koch recently made it more popular when he realized that the 80/20 principle didn’t just apply to wealth. It applied to everything.

• 20% of freeways get 80% of the traffic
• 20% of teams win 80% of the championships
• 20% of customers make 80% of the purchases

The 80/20 principle certainly applies to webinars as well.

20% of your planning will get you 80% of the results. You just have to discover and focus on that 20%.

Here’s how to do it…

1. Choose a Good Topic

Some content is laborious to create.

Other content writes itself.

A good topic really does determine whether the planning is a struggle, or flows seamlessly from inception to creation to delivery.

Draw on what you know about your prospects and customers, and consider what they need to know. What are their pain points? What are their hot buttons? What easy wins can you provide them? Ideally, the topic will be broad enough to attract a large audience, but targeted enough to provide actionable advice that attendees can use right away.

For example, if you run a mobile app development company, a good webinar topic might be “5 tricks for a more profitable app”

2. Create an Action Plan

Your action plan will be the foundation for your webinar. It lays out what each team member must do, from day one of the planning cycle to the post-presentation follow-up. Here’s what your action plan should achieve:

• Define your webinar goals. Know exactly what you want to accomplish with the webinar. Do you want your attendees to purchase your new product/service? Current customers to upgrade? Establish yourself as an authority in the industry? What are your registration and attendee goals?
• Identify the presenter(s). This is the person(s) who will speak in the webinar.
• Define the audience. Is it local, or will timezones come into play? What does your audience do? What do they currently know about the content being presented?
• Define the team. Who will help produce the webinar? Who will promote it? Will there be additional presenters? Make sure each person knows what is expected of them so they can get to work on pulling the pieces together.

3. Craft the Message

Your webinar needs a compelling message that speaks to your audience.  That includes:

Your webinar title – Like a blog title, or a headline, it needs to be compelling enough to engage your prospects, get them to click a link, and learn more.

Benefits – The title should lead right into the benefits. How are you delivering on the promise made in your title? What “wins” will your audience get from attending? Using the design/developer example from earlier, some benefits could be:

• A great trick for getting more and better reviews
• How to double your downloads in 60 days
• Best ways to monetize your app
• How to increase user engagement
• How to make your app stand out in the marketplace

Structure – with the benefits laid out, you can more easily determine the best way to structure the webinar to deliver effective and engaging content. Perhaps each expert takes one of the benefits, or you find and provide an example of each.

4. A Simple, but Effective Slide Deck

Your webinar slides should be engaging and visually appealing. Instead of overloading your slides with bland bullet points, use:

• Bold images & Interesting photos
• Simple headlines
• Screenshots / Examples
• Charts and statistics

Rather than using your slides to deliver the full content, use them as anchor points to give structure to your presentation—then, teach the concepts in your own words. Just make sure you know your material well.

5. Choose the Right Webinar Software

Your job should be content creation, whereas your webinar service should handle pretty much everything else. Great webinar software will simplify the planning, promotion, follow-up and revenue maximization by:

• automating attendee registration
• leveraging facebook for viral promotion of your event
• reminding registrants of your event via email (and SMS!)
• making it easy to charge (if desired) for registration
• simplifying post event-follow by separating attendees and non-attendees
• maximizing exposure with recording, sharing, and autopilot webinars

MeetingBurner is now off the market. 

Webinar planning doesn’t have to be a complex process. With these 5 tips, you can more efficiently plan your webinar and start seeing the benefits in your business.

What are some shortcuts you’ve used for webinar planning? Let us know!

Shared from MeetingBurner and John Rydell

It’s The Webinar Way!!!