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.

Interviewing experts using teleseminars is an excellent way to boost your own credibility.

Here are five (5) expert interview tips to help ensure that host a great teleseminar that will enable both you and your guest(s) shine.

1. Ask Your Attendees for Interview Questions
The best interviews are structured around what your listeners want to hear and the best way to do this is to ask them beforehand. This interview approach means that you need to have a reasonable amount of lead-in time. Some interviews take months of preparation.

So conduct a survey to discover what your listeners want to learn. The Ask Database is an excellent vehicle to do this especially if you are expecting a large volume of questions. The questions asked may be very different from what you think they might be.

You will be able to group and prioritise the most frequently asked questions for the foundation of your interview. You need just about 10 of these for an hour-long interview.

Another advantage of using survey questions to form the structure of your interview is that it gives your guest the chance to prepare for the interview and create an appropriate study guide.

2. Give a Great Introduction
Ask the person you are interviewing to supply their bio and introduction. There are exceptions to this. You may want the person to give their own introduction. Sometimes it comes across better and more interesting this way than you just reading their bio. However, even in this case you still need to be able to give a brief introduction.

3. Listen
The best interviewers are also the best listeners. You have to let go of your ego and your desire to get your point across and allow your guest to speak without interruption. Sometimes you may need to pull an interview back on track but most of the time when guests are interrupted it’s because the interviewer just wants to interject their opinion. This can have the undesired effect of breaking your guest’s concentration and disrupting their flow. You have to bear in mind that those listening to the interview are attending mainly because they want to hear what your guest has to say.

However, there are exceptions to this rule too. For instance, your guest may say something that is a real gem and to capture those nuggets you could say “Could you repeat what you just said?” Interviewees will not mind this and will even feel complimented by this for you are demonstrating that you are listening and that you find what they are saying to be valuable. It is also what we tend to do naturally in a conversation and really good interviews should sound like a conversation.

4. Repeat and Recap
This will help to ensure that you fully understand the point that your interviewee has made and help your listeners to do the same. It also reinforces important points that are made. In addition, repeating and recapping what has been said helps you to monitor the progress of the interview. For instance, if you selected 10 questions to discuss during the interview, it would be a good idea to quickly summarise the main points covered in answering question number seven before moving onto to question eight.

With teleseminars people may tune in late and this technique helps to rapidly bring latecomers up-to-date. If they feel that they cannot easily pick up the thread of the conversation they may simply hang up.

5. Check In with the Audience
The disadvantage of a teleseminar is that you cannot see those attending and this makes it difficult to judge how the interview is being received and how listeners are doing energy wise. So periodically check in with the audience, ask them how they’re doing and affirm that they are receiving great content. This feedback is also important to your guest as it helps them to evaluate how they are doing and whether or not they might need to make any adjustments to the content they are presenting.

However, do mute listeners once the interview has started. If you don’t do this, expect your interview to be interrupted by unwanted background noise and all kinds of embarrassing sounds and conversations have been recorded because attendees haven’t been muted. Not only does back ground noise ruin the quality of the listening experience for the attendees; it also ruins the quality of your recording and makes reduces its monetization value.