Live webinars are becoming a very important part of many industries in modern times. The use of the internet to conduct seminars with an audience that is sitting in remote locations is an outstanding way to engage people who would be hard to reach for an offline event during the existing pandemic. The question of how to host is common. In this post, we will explain how to do it.
Now that we are experiencing the COVID-19 crisis, the importance of remote meetings and online events has taken a whole new meaning. It has become apparent that we need to learn to adapt to a lifestyle that makes constant use of the digital world, also how to host webinars.
This is the reason why webinars have gained so much popularity and they are now becoming the norm for meetings and events in several industries. A large number of people have started to adapt to this kind of interaction, and it could very well become the norm even after this crisis ends.
The process of creating a live webinar used to require a substantial amount of technical knowledge and complex setups that could take hours to fine tune and test before going live. This process is no longer needed with the use of a reliable service that allows you to host a webinar with very little technical knowledge and optimal results.
But how to host? Today, we are going to provide a guide that will show you the steps you need to take in order to host a live webinar for free.
How to host a webinar for free
To host a webinar, you'll need a device with a webcam and microphone, a stable internet connection and an account with a webinar platform like LiveWebinar. Creating an account with LiveWebinar is quick, easy, and, best of all - free!
There are quite a few platforms that allow you for live streaming and broadcasting for free. You can use Facebook Live or Instagram Live to host your webinar. If you want to use a more professional platform and have more features available, you can try out LiveWebinar. Since it allows you to host your free webinars with many other great features, it’s one of the best platforms for those who are looking to start hosting webinars. Creating an account is quick and easy - you can be up and running in minutes!
Select your software
Nowadays there are plenty of options for free webinar software that can be used to run webinars. While it can be overwhelming to find the right fit, keep in mind what you plan to do with your webinars, and how you want to organize the event. If you plan to create evergreen content, make sure that you can record your webinars to keep for later use. If you want to create highly engaging webinars (and let’s be honest, who doesn’t want that?), look for a free webinar software that offers features that let you interact with your audience. These can include polls and tests, whiteboards, breakout rooms and more. A platform that covers all the above-mentioned criteria and more is LiveWebinar. With no necessary downloads or plugins, interactive features and the possibility to customize your meeting room, LiveWebinar is more than capable of hosting your next, great webinar. So how to host properly? Choose LiveWebinar! To learn more, go to http://www.livewebinar.com.
Create a presenter
The second tip of how to host is here. You can create at least one presenter profile for any live webinars you plan to conduct. Most webinar software will have a page for adding presenters where you fill out their basic information. This usually includes their name, contact info, a profile photo and a short bio. Once all of this information is filled out, you can click on save and you will have your presenter profile for the webinar. It’s important to make sure that the short bio is compelling and convincing as this is something that can easily help attract people to your webinar events. You can also have more than one presenter for a webinar.
Schedule a webinar
When scheduling your webinar, the information that’s most necessary will be the name of the webinar, and the date and time. Remember to think about time zones if you’re hosting an international webinar. Selecting a time that works for both someone in Hawaii and in Italy can be difficult but running a successful webinar will depend on it. You can also choose to provide an agenda for the event so that your attendees can get a better idea of what they’ll learn remotely.
Inviting participants
Another tip on how to host is about participants. Hosting a webinar without participants, is, well, not exactly a webinar (unless you plan to record the webinar for later distribution). Adding participants to events is a piece of cake, all that you need is their email, paste it into the corresponding field and hit “Send”. For example, with LiveWebinar you can simply upload a CSV file with a list of the potential participants’ emails and the system will send out invites for you.
Enabling a registration form
With some free webinar software you can opt to create customized registration forms that attended need to fill out in order to join the webinar. You can ask each participant to provide specific information in order to be able to gain access to a webinar. Once they register, they will gain access to a custom URL for the event. This is a great way to create a database of people who are interested your webinars.
Creating a poll or survey
If your selected any webinar software, or free webinar software allows it, you can create polls and surveys ahead of time for your webinar attendees to fill out. This process is very straightforward, and it allows you to create a large number of questions if you need to get some insight from the people who are going to be attending your webinar.
This is a very powerful tool because it makes the whole process of creating a webinar much more engaging to your audience. Surveys and polls make people feel like they are participating and that their opinion and input are of value to you and to your business.
Setting up your recording settings
If you’d like to have content to later sell or distribute, you can record your webinar. This is a very important part to configure because it will allow you to set the quality and the framerate depending on your connection speed. You can also configure the layout, the language and the video bitrate. These configurations will play a major role in the quality of your live video stream.
If your internet connection is low, you are going to have to choose the lowest settings to avoid connection issues between you and your webinar audience. It is recommended that you have a good internet speed for both downloads and uploads if you want to achieve the best results.
If you feel that your internet is not good enough, you want to contact your ISP and find out if you can increase the speed for an affordable cost. it’s always wise to upgrade your connection in order to have quality video for your webinars.
Ready to go live
Now you are set up and ready to go live on the scheduled date. Your event will go live and the number of people who show up are going to be able to gain instant access to it from the email they received.
You need to configure your camera and your microphone to ensure that people can hear you once the webinar begins. This is going to be very important if you want to achieve good results. Make sure that you use a computer microphone that works properly and webcam with a good resolution.
Though platforms are always created to ensure that your live webinar sessions can run smoothly without any hassles, but it’s always a good idea to ask your audience if they can hear you and if the video is not buffering or stuttering while you broadcast live.
How to set up your location
Ready for another tip how to host? Great! When you decide to start streaming live, you need to make sure that you are in a location where you won’t be interrupted, and no external noises are going to interfere with your session. A good way to do this is to inform people in your home or office not to disturb you for a given period of time.
If you plan on having your smartphone with you, it’s a good idea to turn the sound off and leave the phone somewhere that you can see it, but your audience can’t. This way you can keep an eye on any emergencies if you consider it necessary.
If you feel that you can't avoid interruptions in your location, you may want to consider looking for an alternative place to conduct your webinars. People may see it as unprofessional if you are constantly being interrupted in the middle of a webinar.
How to promote your webinars
The last step in our journey to solve the question of how to host is here to tell you to promote your webinars. Sometimes it’s not easy to find people for your webinars and this is the kind of situation that requires proper marketing in order to build a mailing list. A good way to do this is to create a blog that relates to your niche. Make sure that you start blogging about content that your target audience is going to find useful. Creating content is just as important as making sure it loads quickly for your site visitors. It's important to back all your hosted content with the right CDN.
Having a solid content creation process and being consistent with your content is going to be extremely important because this will help you climb the organic results with your targeted keywords. It’s important that you can have a newsletter opt in for your visitors so they can decide to sign up for your newsletter if they find it to be worth their time.
You can also make use of social media for this purpose. Facebook ads happen to be very useful because you can target a very specific audience and you are only going to be paying per click. You could also create a free page on Facebook and start promoting it with friends and family. This is a method that takes much longer, but the results of organic growth are going to be worth the effort. To find even more people, consider creating an affiliate marketing program and give a small commission to the people who recommend your webinar.
Conclusion
Congrats, now you know the basic information on how to host a live webinar! The level of success you are able to achieve with your webinars is going to depend heavily on the amount of promotion you engage for this purpose. Actively broadcasting live webinars is going to help you grow and build your reputation.
Once you have a large number of potential participants, you can start to create new events for a large audience. If you have no lists, and no prospects, you will be able to create a webinar to start trying out this dynamic with a few people. This should be easy as you can invite friends and family to help you conduct a test and see if your webinar configurations are optimal. For your webinar needs, make sound to check out http://www.livewebinar.com. Use our free webinar software and expect changes.