When you host an audio conference call, web conference, or video conference, you are engaging in an interactive dialogue with your participants. This reveals a weak point: if you conduct the best webinar in the world, but without any participants, do you make a sound?

Finding participants for your webinars is sometimes easy. They could be employees for the quarterly meeting, or your core customers for the big annual product update. Sometimes it’s hard to get an audience, like a webinar for potential customers.

It’s when you have a list of leads and a superb webinar to show them that you need to be a bit creative, or at least unique enough to get people to become participants. Here are some suggestions to use emails, registration pages, and eBooks to increase your webinar attendance.

1. In your email invitations, realize that Bold, ALL CAPS, and other visual devices have rendered most invitees jaded, and will encourage them to send your email to the junk folder. Try a more simplistic approach. Tell them they have been invited to a webinar, what it’s about, and how they can join. Ironically, a short, plain email will grab more attention because it’s the opposite of what people normally receive.

2. Strive to encourage participant participation, even in the first email invitation. Announce that there are a few choices for the scope of the webinar and that it will be decided by the participants. Allow them to reply and cast their vote by bolding one of the choices in your list. You can also let them know about a poll on the registration page.

3. Whether you let them decide what the purpose of the webinar is or not, let your potential participants give their input. What are they interested in? What thoughts do your products, company, or guest speaker conjure in their minds? Ask for their suggestions to be delivered by replying to the email, or let them know there will be a place to comment on the registration page.

4. Nothing interests a person more than an answer to their own question. Tell people that you want their questions. Direct them to a place on the registration page to put questions, and that their questions will be answered in the webinar. Make sure to include a specific time for these questions in your public and private agendas and schedules.

5. Give them something to grab their attention. For example, do you have an eBook – or can write one in time for the webinar? Put in your email that after registration for the conference, they can download your eBook “for free.” Or why not give it to them outright? Attach your eBook with the email invitation. The eBook can be about the same things you’ll be discussing in your webinar, or simply about the industry.

People are bombarded by advertising everywhere they go. Even in their homes, if it’s not on the products they buy or the TV, it jumps at them through the internet and email. A nice, austere, genuine invitation email might be a soothing sight for their very sore eyes, separating you from everyone else.