12 Tips for creating A Successful Webinar

Tim Asimos shares some wonderful tips on how to create a successful webinar.

Many B2B companies are already leveraging webinars as part of their content marketing and thought leadership efforts. As with any marketing tactic, a successful and effective B2B webinar is ultimately a byproduct of proper planning and execution.

Whether you are already hosting webinars or considering adding them into your content marketing mix, it’s important to “plan your work” and “work your plan.” So it’s with that in mind that we’ve developed a list of 12 tips to consider when planning and hosting a B2B webinar.

1. Plan, plan, plan

Any webinar that is considered a success by both the host AND the attendees is the result of careful and meticulous planning. Naturally there are a lot of logistics associated with webinars, so it’s important to carefully consider the date, time of day, presenter(s), moderator and topic, among other things. As Benjamin Franklin once said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” This is especially true of webinars.

2. Develop great content

Content is the reason people register and attend your webinar, so without great content you either won’t get people to show up or you won’t get them to come back. Carefully select your topic/title/speaker based on your target audience’s interests and needs, as it relates to what your firm does. Generally speaking, webinars are intended to be educational—not “salesy”—so be sure that you create content that your audience will find helpful and valuable.

3. Put effort into your slide deck

Along those lines, be sure that your slide deck is creative and compelling as well. Remember that it’s meant to support what your presenters are saying, not be what your presenters are saying. Similar to preparing a presentation for other situations, your slide deck should be visual, use large text and avoid trying to cover too much ground on each slide.

4. Use the right tools and equipment

In many ways, a webinar is only as good as the tools you use to produce them. And it starts with choosing the right webinar software. There are a ton of webinar tools out there to choose from (GoToWebinar, WebEx, Adobe Connect, etc.) and selecting the one that’s right for you comes down to capabilities, preferences and cost. Once you know what you need most from the software, choose the one that best aligns with your needs.

And it’s not just the webinar software that matters—having the right equipment is important as well. This includes everything from having the right kind of room to conduct the webinar in, headset microphones that offer crystal clear and static-free sound and a dependable Internet connection.

5. Get the word out

A well-planned webinar with great content, a compelling slide deck and the right tools will be of no use if you don’t have attendees! Once you’ve identified the webinar logistics (date, time, title, etc.) and have set up the webinar in your preferred webinar tool, you need to spread the word! Set up a landing page to promote the webinar and create images and graphics that can be used on the website and social media. We recommend to start promoting at least 3-4 weeks in advance of the webinar, using a variety of methods including email, social media, website calls-to-action and even paid amplification.

6. Be prepared—for everything

I can’t overstate the importance of preparation. While some might think that webinars are easier to present for than an in-person seminar, in some ways they are more difficult. The audience is virtual, so you can’t make eye contact, pick up on social cues or feed off the energy (or notice the lack of) like you can in person. And the audience only has your voice and the slide deck to hold their attention. So naturally, the more prepared you are, the better you’re going to connect with the audience. Know your material, practice and time the presentation and set up early for sound and equipment checks.

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Tips to Help Keep Your Piggy Banks Full

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Another component of preparation includes being ready for the unexpected. What if you lose your Internet connection? What if the phones go down? What if attendees are having trouble logging in? Identifying what could come up and having a contingency plan in place ahead of time will make it much easier to deal with should any problems arise.

7. Designate a producer/moderator

We highly recommend that you designate a “producer” whose primary role during the webinar is simply to run the webinar software console. The presenter(s) should be focused solely on presenting, but you need someone to run the software, collect Q&A submissions, launch poll questions/answers and field comments from participants. The producer can also serve as a moderator, introducing the speaker(s), making announcements and handling audience questions during Q&A. We’ve found this role to be critical to the success of our webinars.

8. Create a webinar production checklist

As we just discussed, running a webinar involves a lot of logistics and details. And forgetting to do something as simple as pressing “record” at the start of the webinar can have a negative impact on the success of your webinar. So to avoid missing any detail and to keep your webinar on track, it’s a good idea to create a webinar production checklist. This should be a list of all activities and items—both big and small—that need to be completed in order to successfully host a webinar.

9. Start on time, end on time

Your audience’s time is valuable, so be sensitive to it and honor the time constraints that you’ve advertised for the webinar. While it’s not uncommon for many webinar attendees to arrive late, it’s still best to still start on time. And it’s equally important that you end on time as well. This points back to the necessity of being prepared and making sure that the presenter has timed their presentation and can stick to the time allotted.

10. Deliver content as promised

The title and description that “sold” the attendees when they registered should be accurate to the actual content that is presented during the webinar. In other words, if they are expecting something educational, don’t make your webinar a thinly veiled sales pitch. Your promotional emails and landing page are essentially a promise, so make sure that by all means you deliver on that promise.

11. Allow time for Q&A

Be sure to allow time at the end of the webinar for taking questions that the audience can submit throughout the webinar. The Q&A provides a great opportunity to engage with the audience and give additional insight to what you have previously discussed, as well as related topics that are of interest to the audience.

12. Follow-up

Last but certainly not least is follow-up and this goes for both attendees and non-attendees. We recommend creating a post-webinar survey that ideally gets served up when the webinar has ended. Keep the survey short and to the point and seek to gauge how well the webinar met the expectations of the attendee, the quality of the speaker/content, suggestions for improvement and ideas for future webinar topics.

You’ll also want to send an email to attendees (ideally within a few hours of the webinar) thanking them for their attendance and offering links to download the slide deck and/or view a recording of the webinar. Similarly to non-attendees, you’ll want to send an email expressing your disappointment that they were unable to attend and offering them the opportunity to download the slide deck and/or view a recording of the webinar as well. You might want to consider a drip campaign as well to keep registrants engaged with additional content that is relevant to the topic of the webinar.

While webinars are an ideal tactic for content marketing, success ultimately depends on how well you plan and execute. Hopefully these 12 tips will provide some insight to help make your B2B webinars more successful.

http://www.business2community.com/b2b-marketing/12-tips-for-hosting-a-successful-b2b-webinar-01242330

Creativity + measurability = Internet marketing success

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

“If your website is on the Internet and no one ever visits it, does it really exist?”

I am not really sure of the answer to the tree question, but when it comes to websites, armchair philosophers all agree: A great website is useless if no one ever visits it.

To take it a step further, no matter how beautiful and functional your website is, it can be a complete waste of marketing dollars if the right visitors never find it.

Internet marketing has become a mandatory part of every general marketing effort. With essentially everyone using the Internet as their primary resource for finding and purchasing products and services, optimizing your Internet marketing strategy is critical to the success of most every business.

With myriad web-based marketing tools and options available, choosing the most effective ones is confusing at best.

Being in the website design and Internet marketing field myself, it has been interesting to witness first-hand which strategies work and which don’t in the quest to draw qualified leads to a website. I have seen email marketing, search engine optimization, paid advertising and affiliate marketing campaigns both succeed and fail in the quest to gain more website leads and sales. Predicting which marketing approaches will work for any given business can be difficult to say the least.

So what’s the secret formula for Internet marketing success?

In thinking about our own marketing efforts as well as those of our clients, the first step to determining the best Internet marketing campaign is to use tools that are easily measurable.

When you initially dream up a web-based marketing campaign, it’s tempting to make decisions based on opinions and hearsay. The color of your logo, the wording of a Google ad, the timing of a mass email — a group of intelligent, experienced and creative individuals often have completely differing subjective opinions.

Whether using email marketing, Facebook ads, Google ads, search engine optimization, or any online effort, the ability to turn the subjective into the objective is what separates a profitable campaign from a waste of money.

The key is to collect your “best-guess” ideas about what marketing strategies and efforts will draw more traffic and sales, and then real-world test them to objectively prove or disprove their effects on profits.

Fortunately, most Internet marketing can be setup in a way that allows businesses to do quick and cheap trial-and-error campaigns before committing to the right mix of long-term marketing activities. Most every aspect from mass email subject-lines, to Facebook ad wording, can be deployed, tested and tweaked both easily and cost-effectively.

Over the past several years, the toolsets available to facilitate this trial-and-error approach to online marketing have multiplied and matured. You can gather most of the data you need using the ever-popular and free Google Analytics. Open rates and click-through rates are reported in most every email marketing system. Web ad testing tools that compare effectiveness of one ad versus another are affordable for any size business. There is no longer any reason to simply guess when it comes to online marketing.

Combining the creative mind to brainstorm ideas with the scientific mind to measure their effectiveness can turn subjective opinions into objective marketing decisions and ultimately increased profits.

http://www.tennessean.com/story/money/tech/2015/05/15/creativity-measurability-internet-marketing-success/27336291/

People Are Flocking to a Social Network That Redistributes 90% of Ad Revenue to Users .

Songwriter Andrew Fromm hit the jackpot when his lyrics became hits for global sensations like the Backstreet Boys, ‘N Sync and a few dozen other artists. But while songwriting once provided him with a more than comfortable lifestyle, the spare change streaming services pay him isn’t even enough for lunch at a Manhattan deli once a month.

While 1.5 million Spotify plays earns Mr. Fromm only $18 in royalties every three months, he’s making more than that daily on Tsu, a social network that actually pays users for their original content, Sebastian Sobczak, founder and CEO of Tsu, told The New York Observer.

On Tsu, users share any original content from artwork and Soundcloud tracks to selfies and videos of their dogs. The company then redistributes 90 percent of its advertising revenue to users in the form of royalties. The more the content is shared and the larger the users’ networks on the platform, the more money gets put into their banks on the site. And the payouts can be big; one million shares could earn a user $1,500, according to Mr. Sobczak.

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Since its launch in late October, the invite-only platform has garnered 3.5 million users who are musicians, artists and everyday social media users.

“You’re seeing a very large music community, a very large art community, and you’re seeing kids with their selfies,” Mr. Sobczak said. “We have people that came out of the woodwork and have become mini celebrities on this platform.”

One mother of four named Kimberly Hendersen began making hundreds of dollars every day when a video she posted of her signing her daughter to sleep went viral. Now, she has a record deal lined up, according to the Daily Mail.

While many everyday people are making a little extra cash from engaging in normal social media activities like sharing their photos, this opportunity to cash in on original content has musicians bringing their music to Tsu.

Independent artists like Tiffany Paige and Meresha have released their songs and EPs exclusively on the site. Today, rapper Azizi Gibson (signed to Waka Flocka’s 36Brickhouse label) is releasing his music video for “Misguided” on Tsu. And these musicians aren’t forming partnerships with Tsu; they’re simply opting for a platform more creator-friendly than the Spotifys and Pandoras of the world.

“Social media is 100 percent user generated, but the platform monetizes 100 percent. No content creators make money. Not Disney, not 50 Cent,” Mr. Sobczak said.

It’s true. For example, Pharrell made only $2,700 from 43 million plays of his mega hit “Happy” on Pandora, according to Business Insider. And While Facebook generated $66,000 in only 24 hours from the latest Cinderella trailer, Disney didn’t make a dime, according to Mr. Sobczak.

http://observer.com/2015/04/people-are-flocking-to-a-social-network-that-redistributes-90-of-ad-revenue-to-users/

The Essentials of Blogging for Small Business

This article is the third in a series of five posts on the basics of online marketing for small business. The series is designed to inform and empower small businesses about their online marketing options and give them the confidence to explore the potential growth opportunities that are available through online marketing.

In this article we will focus on blogging and content marketing. According to Search Engine Journal "60% of consumers feel more positive about a brand after consuming content from it" and 76% of marketers using a blog as part of their content marketing.

Blogging can be important for small businesses who want to communicate with their customer base and boost their SEO rankings.

What is Blogging?

A blog is a collection of articles which are categorically targeted to a particular niche or industry. Blog content is updated regularly and for small businesses it stands as a communication tool between you and your customers and potential customers, providing them with highly valuable content, keeping them up-to-date with useful information such as the latest industry news and/or special offers that you are providing.

Why you should you blog?

Through posting simple things such as helpful tips, special discounts or the latest industry news you can effectively maintain your customer relationships and give people a reason to visit to your website.

More recently blogging and content marketing has been widely used to enhance SEO strategy. Writing articles around the keywords that you are targeting will help to improve rankings in search engines. Furthermore, if you write unique and valuable articles, other websites will link to your content and as a result; this will increase your website's back-links.

In addition to blogging on your own website you can also become a guest blogger on websites who are talking to your target market. Offering articles helps the other blog website serve valuable content and it helps you to position yourself as an expert. These articles can also link back to your website which can generate traffic and is good for SEO purposes.

What to expect:

To get the most out of a blog, you need to make regular posts. This requires dedication and time. Having said that, if you plan ahead it can be fairly easy to provide fresh content several times a week. Once you're in a good routine of posting articles, you can expect to gain an understanding of what content works the best for your business. You can also expect to build a great audience of followers who comment on your articles and join in on the discussion. This sense of a community is great for building and engaging a social media audience and can also great for SEO.

In order to blog successfully and gain a following online, you either need to have excellent existing exposure, or build this up by posting very regularly. Although this can be a big commitment, there are tricks of the trade that can make producing content less of a burden. Because of the time investment that can be required for blogging it is usually best implemented as an integrated part of a bigger online marketing strategy to ensure that it is worth it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bianca-rothschild/the-essentials-of-bloggin_b_7186242.html

Choose the Right Topic If You Want to Make Money from Your Blog

It really is possible to make a decent living or at least generate side income by blogging—but you have to have a strategy. Problogger points out three key factors that influence how successful, revenue-wise, your blog might be.

Can I Really Make a Living by Blogging?

Dear Lifehacker, I'm thinking about starting my own blog. I don't expect it to make me…Read more

The first factor might be the most important: Choosing what your topic will be. If you’re blogging for fun and don’t care about making money online, you can write about anything. If you do want to make money, though, you’ll need to find a profitable niche and choose a topic that is broad yet also specific:

One of the first things you want to think about is your niche and whether it is profitable. Some experts advise being a big fish in a small pond, but I think the exact opposite. You should try the big pond because that is where the money is.

While your great Aunt Mary’s unique recycled dress quilts might be amazing, not that many people are as interested in reading about them as about quilting in general. Don’t limit your topic too much.

When I first got started, I created a site selling inflatable boats online. Can you imagine how many people might buy inflatable boats online? That’s right, not many.

To find that niche, Problogger recommends looking at keywords that advertisers pay the most for, using tools like Google Adsense to see average prices per click or SpyFu, a paid search engine marketing tool (with a 30-day money back guarantee, so you could try it just for this purpose). Similarly, take a look at affiliate programs at Commission Junction to get a feel for potential earnings. 

Of course, you should be interested in the topic too and be able to write about it, but these are other considerations if you want to get cash out of your endeavor. Check out the full post for other important factors.

http://lifehacker.com/choose-the-right-topic-if-you-want-to-make-money-from-y-1699725331

11 Best Online Marketing Training Materials

Great Tips  for anyone thinking of setting an Internet Marketing Business

What are the best training materials out there for someone who wants to get up to speed on online marketing best practices?

1. Avinash’s “Occam’s Razor”

Avinash Kaushik’a blog Occam’s Razor is a must-read. He is primarily concerned with measurement and analytics. Any digital marketer worth their weight knows that this is the where money is really made and lost. Platforms and strategies come and go, but effective analytics are a timeless method to ensure success in a shifting marketplace. – Jack Hanlon, Kinetic Social

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2. Lynda.com

To gain the fundamentals in anything digital media, Lynda.com is tough to beat. Their instructors are fantastic, a membership is highly affordable and the courses are regularly updated to stay on top of the latest trends. Courses also vary by level of expertise, so you can avoid diving into the deep end too fast. – Jeff Rohr, SquareOffs


Read more at http://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/11-best-online-marketing-training-materials-01160589#8G6ts29dURBqdpUy.99

3. SearchEngineWatch.com or SearchEngineLand.com

There is an absolute treasure trove of free Internet Marketing content on SearchEngineWatch.com and SearchEngineLand.com. White papers, how-to guides, perspectives from multiple experts, reviews and more are a click away. Other great sources include Moz.com (formerly SEOmoz), SearchEngineJournal.com, SEObook.com, the KISSmetrics Blog and Neil Patel’s QuickSprout. –Kristopher Jones, LSEO.com

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4. John Jantsch’s Duct Tape Marketing

I’ve been following John Jansch’s Duct Tape Marketing advice for years. John says that his guidance is targeted to small business owners, but the truth is, it will work for any business that wants to do online marketing efficiently and cost-effectively. His approach evolves with the times and the arsenal of content available at his site is impressive indeed. – Alexandra Levit, Inspiration at Work

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5. Coursera

image: http://cdn2.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/53c44aba6e730ca4008b4567.png.png

There are several classes being offered for free by professors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business on traditional and digital marketing. As academics, professors are required to stay up-to-date on the newest and best practices in the field, so taking advantage of their knowledge for free is a no-brainer! – Firas Kittaneh, Amerisleep

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6. Content Marketing Institute

Contentmarketinginstitute.com

 is a great place to start. They offer webinars and training sessions that teach best practices, and their blog is legit. As an overall ‘best practices’ resource, CMI will help you build a good foundation. – Ryan Shank, Mhelpdesk

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7. Growthhackers.com

image: http://cdn.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/549359426e730ca8008b4568.png.png

Sean Ellis, early growth hacker at Dropbox and founder of Qualaroo, built growthhackers.com to create a community of folks interested in all things growth. Like Reddit, top articles are voted up and the cream of the crop usually catches momentum. –Sathvik Tantry, FormSwift

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8. The American Marketing Association

The American Marketing Association has many good resources for marketers to achieve success. Much of their content is premium or available only to their members, but they do have good industry whitepapers, reports and case studies on online marketing. – Miles Jennings, Recruiter.com

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9. Constant Contact

some of the best advice can be found on websites like Huffington Post. You’ll see up-to-date tips from some of the best minds in business today. Additionally, Constant Contact provides seminars on an ongoing basis in cities across the country. As well, if professionals are interested in videos they can watch now, Moz Academy has a series of videos on topics like inbound marketing and SEO. – Drew Hendricks, AudienceBloom

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10. Copyblogger and GrowthHackers

I find all of Copyblogger’s material to be extremely high impact. Their e-books and blog articles are of great quality. I’m an authority member and can vouch for great premium content as well! I’ve definitely received a return on my investment there. For specific questions and to keep an eye on trends, I regularly check out GrowthHackers. – Dan Pickett, Launch Academy

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11. The Noob Guide to Online Marketing

The Noob Guide to Online Marketing will give you a solid start on online marketing best practices. I used to run an inbound marketing agency and this guide was considered required reading for new hires. – Owen Fuller, Qzzr


Read more at http://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/11-best-online-marketing-training-materials-01160589#8G6ts29dURBqdpUy.99

http://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/11-best-online-marketing-training-materials-01160589

Facebook admits it tracks non-users, but denies claims it breaches EU privacy law

Samuel Gibbs

@SamuelGibbs

Friday 10 April 201511.49 BSTLast modified on Friday 10 April 201511.52 BST

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Facebook has admitted that it tracked users who do not have an account with the social network, but says that the tracking only happened because of a bug that is now being fixed.

The social network hit out at the report commissioned by the Belgian data protection authority, which found Facebook in breach of European data privacy laws, saying that the report “gets it wrong multiple times in asserting how Facebook uses information”.

“The researchers did find a bug that may have sent cookies to some people when they weren’t on Facebook. This was not our intention – a fix for this is already under way,” wrote Richard Allan, Facebook’s vice president of policy for Europein a rebuttal.

Allan listed and responded to eight claims isolated from the report written by researchers at the Centre of Interdisciplinary Law and ICT (ICRI) and the Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography department (Cosic) at the University of Leuven, and the media, information and telecommunication department (Smit) at Vrije Universiteit Brussels.

Some of the claims listed by Facebook are not made in the report, including one that states “there’s no way to opt out of social ads”. The report clearly states that “users can opt-out from appearing in so-called Social Ads”.

“Facebook’s latest press release (entitled “Setting the record straight”) attributes statements to us that we simply did not make,” said authors of the study Brendan Van Alsenoy from the ICRI and Günes Acar from Cosic.

Cookies, tracking and web impressions

Facebook also disputed some of the terms the authors of the report use, such as their definition of “tracking”.

“Facebook does receive standard ‘web impressions’, or website visit information, when people visit sites with our plugins or other integrations. The authors misleadingly call this ‘tracking’,” said Allan. “Unlike many companies, we explain how we will use this information and the controls we honour and offer.”

Allan also wrote that Facebook is transparent about Facebook’s use of cookies for security, personalisation and ads.

“Cookies tell us when people are logged into Facebook. That’s why you don’t have to enter your name and password every time you visit, and so we can alert you in case someone else is trying to log in as you from an unknown computer,” said Allan.

But he also reinforced the point that “Facebook is offered free of charge, and we do that by showing ads we think are relevant to people’s interests”, which is also the funding method used to support many other services including those from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and media organisations.

The Belgian Privacy Commission is expected to decide whether to act on the report on 29 April.

Facebook is under increasing pressure outside of Ireland, where the company is headquartered and regulated by the Irish data protection authority. A task force of data regulators from Belgium, France, Spain and Italy has been set up to look at Facebook’s privacy practices, while the Flemish, Dutch and European parliaments have also called for closer looks at the company.

“We deliberately chose to open up our findings to public scrutiny so that anyone can check our sources and methodology. People who are interested can compare the ‘claims’ Facebook attributes to our report with its actual contents. We still remain open to additional comments and suggestions, including from Facebook, in relation to our actual findings,” said the authors of the report.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/10/facebook-admits-it-tracks-non-users-but-denies-claims-it-breaches-eu-privacy-law