When you host a webinar or a live online learning broadcast, it’s always a good idea to start up your webinar at least 10 minutes before it begins so people can come to the webinar and be ready for you when you start talking. But the problem that I see when people run these webinars is they will get on even half an hour early and talk on and on and on every minute and pretty much say nothing for half an hour just to keep people who come early to stay on the call.
How do you overcome this? You wait before broadcasting your audio. You present a countdown timer and you set up a PowerPoint slide with exact instructions.
The service that I use for webinars which you should use too is called “GoToWebinar.” One feature that is slightly confusing is when you start a webinar, you first show your screen and then you begin the audio broadcast. What this means is if you show your screen and have not yet began the broadcast, it will send a pre-recorded message once a minute saying, “The broadcast has not yet started. Please standby. Please wait for the webinar to begin.” This way, if someone comes half an hour before, you don’t have to sit there repeating the same message. The GoToWebinar service will do this for you.
The next thing that really helps is to show a countdown timer. You can find any countdown timer by going to Google.com, but I use a piece of software called Cool Timer. What this lets me do is set the clock for say, 30 minutes, and the time will count down one second at a time on my screen. Because I’m sharing my screen and not my audio, it will show the seconds taking away so if somebody comes 10 or 20 minutes early, they will know exactly how long they have to wait until the training begins.
Finally, one thing that I always see people forget is to create a PowerPoint slide that has instructions. Usually, this is going to be the first slide of your presentation. Give them instructions. Tell them what the title of the topic is. If there are special things that needed to do to try on their audio, tell them about that. If the webinar begins at a certain time, have that in the title slide. That way, when someone joins your call early, they will first of all get the audio reminder that the webinar has not yet started, they will see the countdown timer, and the PowerPoint will tell them exactly when the training starts.
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