Why hosting webinars is good for your online presence

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Updated on March 11th, 2013

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This is a guest blog post.

Webinars are the perfect platform for improving your online presence. A webinar is essentially Internet based seminars, allowing business owners to host conferences for customers, clients and partners to attend remotely. The form the webinar takes is up to the host, but they can be extremely useful forums for online meetings, tutorials, knowledge and idea sharing events; presentations, product and service demonstrations, or simply as a forum for conversations between hosts and attendees.

Crucially, webinars can form an important extension of a website or blog, adding a personal touch and an extra dimension to online businesses. There are plenty of great reasons for hosting regular webinars, from promoting products and sharing content to receiving feedback and maintaining customer-client partnerships. The main benefit is the way these online conferences boost your online presence.

Online providers offer plenty of free and premium rate webinar platforms available to download from the Internet, so you can quickly and easy set up, invite your audience and begin hosting online conferences.

Advantages of Hosting Webinars

Establishing a conversation with your customers, clients and business partners. Whatever the nature of your website or blog, webinars are a great platform for communicating your latest news and activities and receiving feedback from the people who count.

Webinars provide a means of educating your target audience, sharing and demonstrating your knowledge and expertise.

Supplying quality content to your audience.

Networking, linking up with a wider audience and building relationships with your clients, customers and partners.

Adding Personality to Your Brand

Webinars are the perfect way to add personality to your blog or website – giving a recognizable face and voice that customers can link to your product or service. When people feel that they know the person behind the product they are more likely to continue to do business with them, and to share your blog or website with their network and continue to grow your online presence.

Providing Quality Content and Expertise

Webinars are a platform for sharing great content with your customers and demonstrating your expertise. Whatever field you are working in, your website and blog is a showcase for what you do – a webinar is a powerful extension of the platform, allowing you to give tutorials and display your skills and knowledge. This promotes confidence in your audience, helping them to develop trust in what you say.

In addition to proving your expertise, webinars provide opportunities to share quality content with customers and reward them attending. Giving a little extra makes it more likely that your audience will return again and again.

Developing Relationships and Building Trust

Some of the main advantages of hosting regular webinars is linking up with you customer base, developing a sense of mutual trust and maintaining long lasting and mutually rewarding business relationships. Instead of viewing webinars simply as channel for broadcasting adverts for your product or service, these conference should be part of nourishing partnerships with clients and customers. An ongoing conversation between the host and attendees is the perfect way to receive and act upon feedback, evolving products and services in response to the audience’s response and requirements.

Hosting your first webinar may seem like a daunting task – you need to set out the topic, structure the event as you would with a traditional ‘real’ seminar, and then establish the technical aspects such as choosing a host and working out the details of attendee interaction. Your existing client address book and social networking presence can form the basis of inviting an audience to attend your webinars.

Once you start it should become easier, and as you continue to host webinars it should become clear how these events best suit your business, how they build on your customer-client relationships, and how they can truly benefit and grow your online presence.

If you want to know more about effectively putting together a webinar reach out to me at www.twitter.com/thecreditletter.

This was a guest blog by Kayla Wilson. Editor of The Credit Letter Blog