5 Tips For Holding a Great Technical Writing Webinar

Pay attention to the following 5 suggestions if you’d like to hold a successful technical writing webinar:

1) Do not rush your technical writing or product presentation even if you are used to speaking at a machine gun pace. There might be people in your audience with hearing problems, international participants who do not know your language that well, or there might be a technical problem with the way your voice is transmitted across the line.

How do you know if you’re talking too fast? JUST ASK and your audience will tell you gladly if you are speaking too fast (or too slow) or not.

2) If you have a hard-to-understand heavy regional accent, either ask someone else with a standard accent to give the presentation, or SLOW down and periodically check with your audience to make sure they are following what you are saying.

If you just assume that your accent is understood clearly by those on the line, you might be making a wrong assumption and wasting everybody’s time and your company’s money.

3) If you provide the means (usually a GUI text field with a SUBMIT button at the bottom) for your audience to send you questions, answer them. If you are not in a position to answer the questions, then do not provide the means to submit any questions. Otherwise you’ll be speaking to a frustrated audience and frustrated people don’t follow or buy anything. It just makes plain sense, doesn’t it?

4) Always make it painfully clear well in advance WHAT you will exactly cover in your presentation, for WHOM the presentation was designed, and what are the PREREQUISITES to follow the presentation fruitfully.

Make all these three points very clear in your advance emails in order to prevent unnecessary surprises. There is nothing more annoying than a fast-talking presenter showing you things on a piece of software that you do not even own and explaining a topic that is well beyond your education or expertise level.

5) Inform you audience before, during, and after the presentation whether the recording of the session, any presentation notes, PDF files or white-paper will be available to the participants. That way you won’t leave them in suspense and prevent unnecessary emails and phone calls to your organization.

A webinar is a great way to share knowledge and to market your products and services. But when handled poorly it can backfire and damage your image and business as well. There is no such thing as a fool-proof presentation “on the automatic.”

All webinars need careful advance work and a thoughtful presentation which is in touch with the audience. If you follow these 5 recommendations above your job might get just a bit easier. Good luck.