Webinars and online meetings are becoming increasingly popular because of convenience and cost saving advantages compared to on site meetings. Online meetings and webinars give businesses the opportunity to present to anyone across the globe in a matter of seconds with stunning multi-media presentations, interactivity and collaboration. Businesses save on travel expenses and save time by hosting meetings from their computer.

I have learned a lot in my experience hosting webinars and online meetings. You could say I “learned the hard way” on a few occasions simply because this type of media was new to me. Luckily, I learned tons from the mistakes I made and can now pass this information along to you so you can be on your way to giving trouble free and impactful webinar presentations.

1: Plan ahead

The smoothest and best presentations are one’s that are planned in advance. This gives you opportunities to schedule the best time to present where you can have the highest attendance and participation, put together a well-thought presentation and buys you time for the other tips I’ll cover.

2: Schedule multiple dry runs

Since webinars are live, you want to make your mistakes and uncover technical difficulties in your dry runs. Trust me; things will go wrong, on both your dry runs as well as your live events. The more planning and preparation you do, the smoother your presentations will be. Dry runs allow you to practice handing control off to various presenters both on and off site, experiment with loading presentations into your platform or sharing your desktop as well as testing various technology and its potential limitations.

Some presenters are comfortable and great at speaking while others need practice. Dry runs are great for getting everyone comfortable in actually speaking and going through their presentations. Be sure to pay attention to things such as how good you can hear someone, talking on speakerphone doesn’t always sound good on the other end.

3: Have a back-up plan

Like I said earlier, thing can and often will happen no matter what your preparation. Technology is technology and sometimes unpredictable. So, have multiple back-up plans. For example, give attendees several invites with both direct links to the webinar as well as a link to your account page where they can find your meeting in case the original link doesn’t work.

If something, like technology fails, have some back-ups so that your troubles don’t seem obvious. Some good ideas are to have polls/questions to show if something goes wrong. This will keep your audience engaged and give you a little time to fix whatever is broken.

Have multiple ways to communicate with your attendees. Have them let you know of any troubles they might be having through email, Twitter or private chat.

Login and set your meeting up about 15 minutes prior to ensure a smooth and successful set-up.

4: Ask for help

What I mean by asking for help is to try to avoid hosting webinars alone. It is always nice to have a wing man or two to help you track the live Twitter stream, check emails for attendees with trouble (on another computer, not the one you are launching the presentation from), monitor the chat window etc.

5: Don’t be boring

The last thing you want to do is to put all this work into a boring presentation that no one will enjoy or remember. Please try refrain from putting together a long PowerPoint slideshow filled with lots of text and reading from the slides. You might as well save yourself the time and not even do it if that’s all you plan on doing. Think about webinars you attend, what makes them good and what makes them suck? Try splitting up your text with images. Try to limit how much text you add on each slide. Make an effort to avoid covering more than 3 points per slide (strive to be under 3!). Limit the number of slides you use. Can you go out to the internet during your presentation instead of showing a screenshot? Also, another cool platform I recently tried in one of my presentations was using Prezi instead of PowerPoint. Man, what a difference it makes!

Try to mix in polling questions or regular questions. Have multiple presenters. Just mix it up so you don’t put people to sleep!

6: Be engaging

Try to get your attendees involved. Include a Twitter hashtag (#) for your event and encourage live communication in the live stream (this is when it’s great to have that wing man I mentioned earlier). Open up the chat dialog, feature polling questions, show a video, go out to the web, tell a joke, and open up a live Q&A at the end.

7: Re-purpose

If you put together an awesome presentation that does not cover private topics that you wouldn’t want others to see, re-purpose your presentation. You can send out your slides afterwards, post them online, write a blog post about it, and use some of the content for an e-newsletter. Might as well maximize all the hard work you put in.

8: Promote

Promote your events in your email blasts, on your blog, through social media such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Send out multiple invites so that people remember. Try to automate your invites so that the event is saved in attendees Outlook calendars.

9: Learn

Most online meeting companies have lots and lots of information you can digest to improve your skills. Some offer their own webinars, universities, downloadable toolsets, forums etc. The more knowledgeable you are about the platform you are using the better. This will make you more comfortable, savvy and confident in incorporating more into your presentations and events.

10: Eliminate interruptions

An important and surprisingly often overlooked element in successful presentations is to eliminate potential interruptions. This includes TURNING YOUR OUTLOOK OFF during your presentation so that your attendees will not see your incoming mail flashing in the bottom corner of their screen.

Pick a quiet room in your office where your attendees will not hear background noise. If you want to save participation till the end or have a large number of attendees, a powerful but simple tip is to mute all attendees on entry. People who are attending webinars are often working while they watch, which means they could put you on hold and everyone can hear their hold music. Please don’t let that happen to you! This tip alone will save you much agony and frustration. You can always un-mute when you want interaction and you have other ways for people to communicate with you and each other such as public and private chat, raising hands and through Twitter.

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