Have you been thinking of running a webinar for your business but you don’t feel that you’re a good writer to know how to write a webinar, plus you’re not sure what to include or what goes where in your order?
Webinars can be a great way to showcase your expertise, attract new leads and to make sales so let’s look at a simple way to write a webinar.
How to write a webinar
1. Start with the end in mind
It may feel back to front to start at the end, yet knowing what you want to achieve with your webinar will help you to write it.
The purpose of a webinar is usually to promote a service that you’re offering. You might be encouraging people to buy on the webinar or to book in a call to discuss working with you. That service will solve a particular problem for your audience so you need to ensure that the webinar topic naturally flows through to your service.
Action: Decide on the service you’re offering. Ensure your webinar topic flows naturally through to your service.
2. Storyboard your ideas
When I create a new webinar I map out the various pieces of the training before I start writing my speaker notes. You can do this by drawing up a series of squares on a piece of paper or by using post it instead of squares as they’re easy to move around and add to as you develop your ideas.
Each square will contain a brief description of what you want to cover in that slide. You’re effectively creating a summary which will make it much easier to write the substance of your webinar.
What you include in each square will depend on your topic and your style of communication. That said I’d usually recommend including the following:
Introduction: Keep this short. Let people know what you do and something personal they can relate to.
What you’re covering: Remind people of the reason they signed up for your webinar so they know they’re in the right place. The outcomes you mentioned on your sign up page, or in your webinar promotions, can be reused here.
Why it’s important: Give a short explanation of why the topic you’re talking about is important to your ideal clients. Connect your topic back to the challenge that your attendees are facing.
Core content: Map out your core content. Remember you don’t want to dump all of your knowledge on your attendees so be sure to edit and refine what you are sharing. Keep it simple and easy for people to follow.
Lead into your service: Now you can connect the topic you’ve been covering to the service that you offer.
Describe your service: Give the details of your service, ensuring that the outcomes of what you offer are clear. Let people know how they can contact you about your service.
Questions and wrap up: Ask if anyone has any questions then wrap up the webinar.
Action: Create a storyboard for your webinar.
3. Start writing
Now you can start writing! You can be as brief or as lengthy as you like with your notes.
You might like to write everything out in full, almost like a script, if this is your first webinar as that can give you confidence when speaking. The added bonus of doing this is that you can reuse those script as the base for future blog posts or social media posts.
If you’re used to public speaking you might write short bullet points that you can speak to.
Actions: Write the first draft of your webinar. Create your slides. Do a practise run or two, then refine your notes and slides as needed.
Don’t be tempted to skip the practise! By reading your notes out loud you’ll quickly see where the flow isn’t working well, where you’ve included too much information and where you might need to add in more details.
4. Include questions
It’s important to me that my attendees get a lot out of my webinars so I’ll ask questions throughout the training to make sure that people are engaging with what I’m saying. The added benefit of asking questions is that I see them describe their challenges and situations in their words and discover what they find most useful from the training.
Your goal is not to write the perfect webinar straight out of the gate. Rather, it’s to continually improve your writing and presentation skills compared to the last training that you did. These are skills we all need to practise.
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