Webinar service providers

Lesson Details:

Video Transcription: There are dozens of webinar service providers out there and all of them do roughly the same thing this video is brought to you by Appy Pie’s Academy. you might want to look at the specific details of a provider to find out which one is for you and first if you're new to webinars let me define what a webinar service provider is a webinar service provider essentially provides the connection between you and your audience generally they have a centralized way for your audience to sign up for the webinar and then to view the webinar you essentially send your audio and video from your computer to the webinar service provider then that webinar service provider will serve that audio and video in real-time to your entire audience they'll provide a specific URL for them to view the webinar the one that I happen to use is called go to what called GoToWebinar this is one of the oldest webinar service providers and I think it's a good one however you certainly could convince me that others are just as good and provide more features that might be useful to you the webinar service provider does not market your webinar they essentially take you through a process in which he will create the webinar so let me show you how that works in my particular provider I'm gonna sign in and once I've signed in you go to a dashboard now your webinar service provider may not work exactly this way but it's gonna have a similar process attached to it so I'm gonna click the schedule button and then I'm going to schedule the webinar now it needs some basic information here the event title some people think this is a throwaway I think the event title is really important because you want this to engage your audience so for my invent title I'm gonna say learn to code in Python write your first lines of code in just 30 minutes the idea here I'm giving them a compelling reason to come generally you'll select whether the event is live or recorded generally I do my webinars live I don't do a lot of recorded webinars when does the webinar occur now this is something people don't think about a whole lot but you're gonna want to think about where your audience is physically located if your audience is located heavily in the United States and you do something in 3 p.m. New York time well the whole country basically is gonna be at work unless maybe you're targeting high school students after school you've got to think about a date and time that makes sense for the people who are gonna attend your webinar if your clients for your audience are people at work specific businesses you're doing b2b you might want to schedule it during work time and then of course time zone this causes more confusion than just about anything else I know of in webinars is people making a mistake with the time zone so you want to be very careful when you set the time zone to make sure that you're consistent with using that time zone for everybody all right so once I've got that in my software we can go ahead and schedule the webinar we've got our name live occurs once date time and now we can schedule the webinar and now the webinar scheduled and I can add to the description etc but when it comes time for the webinar to occur.

I'm simply going to click the start button and then the webinar provider is going to take over and provide the software that actually runs the webinar hopefully I'll be able to show you that in just a quick second here so this is the GoToWebinar control panel and this essentially is how I control the webinar using my webinar system or software and generally all of them have something similar here I can see exactly what the users are seeing I have some information about who's attending the audio controls you can see there that it's detecting my built-in microphone whether or not I'm using my and then questions or pools I may have set up for the webinar itself so that in a nutshell is what your webinar service provider does and again go to webinars the one I use I'm not recommending or endorsing it you will need to select from a number of them another popular one is hope big marker and again though they all do relatively the same thing you've got to sort through the different features and figure out what exactly you need and of course the second factor is cost GoToWebinar can be on the expensive side just so you get an idea of the pricing there starter is $89 a month when billed annually if we looked at that monthly $109 a month I have the pro time excuse me up to five hundred dollars five hundred percent participants which is two hundred fifty dollars a month and if you have really large webinars you need the plus plan which is five hundred dollars a month now don't get too worried if you're just getting started you don't have to use GoToWebinar there are other webinar providers that actually have free plans or very low cost plans so cost and features or something you're gonna have to sort out when you choose your webinar service provider once you do though you're going to find that they have all the features you need to broadcast and control your webinar content.