One feature that is commonly overlooked with webinars is the ability to have a co-host or a panelist on a webinar. In fact, you can have many panelists on a webinar. You can unmute people. You can pass the screen to people. You can give others the ability to see questions and start surveys; and the best part about this is when these different panelists are speaking, the webinar software will say, “Now speaking…” and the name of the person, so it’s easy to identify who is saying what. That begs the question, “Should you get panelists on your webinar?” and “Are they required?”
They are helpful but they are not required. You need to be able to stand on your own. You need to be able to get a partner needing you more than you need them and you should be careful about who you unmute on a live call. With anything but especially with webinars, you’re going to have a lot more power if you first master running webinar by yourself. This way, you’re not dependent on anyone else’s webinar account or on anyone to introduce you. You can run the show. I have put on many webinars where I presented with a partner and one of our computers broke; either we lost our internet connection, the computer crashed, or the webinar software crashed, and I needed the other person to fill in for me or vice versa.
It’s a lot better to have two people who could stand on their own than two people who are dependent on each other to run a webinar. This will also make it easy to get a partner on a webinar if you really want one. If things with you and your webinar partner are not working out, it should be easy for you to find a new webinar partner. If your business partner refuses to do webinars, you can present this offer, “I am going to run this webinar with or without you. I’d rather it’s with you but if I have to, I will run it all by myself.” Then, your business partner will want to be on the webinar just to not be left out.
When we’re talking about panelists, your panelists don’t have to be needed the entire time. I put on calls where the panelists introduced me to his subscribers and didn’t really have much to say until the end. On the other hand, I’ve also been on calls where we ran an interview and the panelists had all the questions to ask me and I simply answered them. But be careful who you unmute on a webinar. It seems like common sense but there are a lot of weirdoes on the internet, a lot of people who just love to cause a riot in a webinar. Even if someone has good intentions, far too often, when I have unmuted someone, they didn’t have their microphone ready or I heard an echo in the backgrounds. So you definitely should not unmute anyone on the webinar who you choose and you shouldn’t count on that person to have the proper audio hardware to even speak to you. If you do unmute someone, make sure it’s someone you trust and someone who either has a headset or has dialed in on the phone for their audio.
Panelists on a webinar are great but you don’t always need them. You should be able to stand on your own, you should be able to tell on a webinar that you don’t need them to run the webinar and you don’t want to unmute every single person on a call.
Figure out exactly how to run your own webinar, with a partner or without, at www.webinarcrusher.com.
